Why Lifestyle Product Photography is Important

When a business creates a product for consumers, the first thing they try to figure out is how exactly to market that product. Sure, standard product photos with a simple backdrop work great for showing the product itself, but these images don’t necessarily connect your products to your brand’s identity, and they also don’t necessarily invoke any sort of excitement in your customers. This is why lifestyle product photography is important.

But, what exactly is lifestyle product photography? Lifestyle photography in general is a type of photography that showcases people in every day scenarios. A lot of the poses in this type of portrait photography are candid, as the idea is to capture a natural, real life look in your photos. Lifestyle photos also generally capture the scene that your models are in to help tell the story of what exactly they’re doing.

For instance, if you’re photographing someone out skiing, you’d also want to capture the snow around them, the snow-covered trees, and even the large snow-capped mountains behind them. All of these foreground and background elements help showcase a very specific lifestyle for the person who’s being photographed.

With lifestyle product photography, we try to capture a specific lifestyle and story on camera to showcase how a specific product fits into that lifestyle and enhances it.

So, why is lifestyle product photography important for a business? Let’s find out.

Builds Your Brand’s Identity

Every business has a story, and good products will typically invoke the stories, values and overall spirit of the business. The key to lifestyle product photography is capturing elements from the business’s story, and meshing the product into the overall vision and journey. As you start to develop more and more lifestyle product photos and videos for your business, you will start to shape the actual image of your business and what you represent. All of these compiled images become a large part of your overall brand.

With lifestyle product photography, you can take your products or services and place them in the scenarios that work with your overall brand identity. For instance, if you’re an outdoor apparel brand focused on skiing and snowboarding gear, you may want to focus a lot of your lifestyle product photography on scenes in the mountains, as scenes inside a studio won’t really showcase the essence of the ski jackets.

Again, every lifestyle product photography image that you create has the potential to further grow your brand’s identity. And the cool thing is that you’re in complete control of that. All you need to do is pinpoint what scenes and scenarios represent what your brand’s all about, insert your products into those scenarios, and then potentially hire a commercial photographer to capture some images.

Toronto Lifestyle Product Photographer. Click here to reach out today!

Shows How a Product Can be Used

In addition to building your brand identity, lifestyle product photography also showcases how your products were intended to be used. Again, going back to the outdoor apparel brand example, if you have a ski jacket that was designed to keep you warm and dry in deep powder, showcasing a skier riding through deep power would help sell the idea and capabilities behind that product.

Sure, general product photos help show the details of a product, and product descriptions try to convince potential customers about what your product can do, but visually seeing a product in action can really leave an impression in people’s heads and help sway their purchasing decision. So, make sure you provide potential customers with some images that show how your products can be used, or what they can be used for.

Helps Create a Sense of Desire

For a customer to purchase your product, they need to envision themselves actually using it. Lifestyle product photography provides potential customers with this vision, and also creates a sense of desire to use the product as well.

Let’s use the outdoor apparel brand example once more. If your potential customers like to ski, then seeing imagery of your products in action out on the ski slopes not only helps them associate your brand with skiing (creating brand identity), but also makes them want to ski more as well. The more potential customers see your outdoor apparel in action out on the ski slopes, the more association they have with your brand as the go-to outdoor apparel brand for skiing. Thus when those same potential customers go to purchase their new ski jacket, they have already built up the story and desire for your brand based on the image and idea that they have from it. And that sense of desire is all possible by simply creating lifestyle product photography. This is true in any industry.

The cool thing is that, in today’s day and age, you can upload lifestyle product photography photos to your social media accounts, website and blog, and completely create your brand identity and evoke desire in the digital world.

Conclusion

Lifestyle product photography is a powerful way to showcase your products to potential customers. This type of photography helps you develop your brand’s identity through carefully crafted images that tell a story. These lifestyle product photo stories then create a sense of desire within your potential customers, as they start to envision themselves using your products through your lifestyle product photos. These photos can then also help showcase how your products were meant to be used, further creating a sense of desire to use your products.

Has your brand started using lifestyle product photos yet? If not, give me a shout. I’d be happy to help your brand capture strong lifestyle product photos in the Toronto area.