Budding Ghanaian photographer, Elroy Salam at an interview with Eric Asamoah Jnr on EBN TV during their Fashion & Soul show, highlighted on the psychological relation photography has on marketing and advertisement.
According to the award-winning photographer, “photography is a cornerstone of modern marketing, and focusing on photography can help your business stand out from the crowd. The vast majority of marketers are not psychologists, but they do know how to apply its study to draw in and connect with clients. This is not some kind of extra-ordinary knowledge – it’s just the obvious things you might have never been thinking about.”
Elroy Salam who won the Best Photographer at the Fashion and Lifestyle Awards ’17 disclosed that, “photography is fundamentally a relationship between the photographer and the viewer. And a successful photograph is one that is able to communicate to the viewer and be able to sell a product without much captions”.
He added, “There was a psychological experiment carried out in Harvard, where a group of students were taught how to take high-quality black and white photos, and how to use a dark room to process them. After the students took a lot of photos, they were asked to choose just two shots and print them. And at the end of the exercise, each student was told that they had to give up one of their photographs, but they could keep the other one.
Half of the group were told that they could change the picture to the second one if they changed their mind, and the other part of the group were told that the decision is final and they could not change the picture even if they change their mind.
The result showed that the part of the students that had less choice were happier with their snapshots than the other part. The other part that had more choice were disappointed and yearning about the photos days after the experiment.
Knowing that less choice is better, you can use it for your marketing. If you have too many products or services, for instance, photography pack, prints, photo albums, try to group them and deliver in smaller chunks that will help to focus on a particular product group instead of getting lost in a variety of choices.”
He concluded that you don’t need a degree in psychology to influence customers’ behaviour.
Putting in time and effort to apply some of these tactics and with a good photographer on your team can almost for sure get you great results.
