Using Product Imagery to Influence your Customers’ Emotions in your Favor

When customers are looking to make a purchase, product images can play a big role in their decision-making process. Learn how to evoke the right emotions with your product photography.

Understanding how product imagery can influence a customer’s decision to purchase an item is vital to reaching your goals. By understanding how to evoke emotional triggers through your product photography, you can ensure that the right message is delivered to your customers, making them more likely to buy from your store. 

In order to pull at the heartstrings of your potential customers and get them emotionally invested in your product, it is important to consider the colors and photography techniques you use. Let’s dive into some of the most common triggers that businesses use with respect to capturing the right emotional cues.

Emotional Triggers in Branding

Some of the most common emotional triggers that businesses use in their product imagery are happiness, excitement, comfort, and luxury. Let’s take a closer look at each of these triggers and how you can use them to boost sales for your business.

Happiness

Bright colors are known to increase feelings of happiness and positivity. If you’re going to use models, you want them to be smiling. This will help create a positive association between your products and feelings of happiness and satisfaction. For example, have you ever noticed how advertisements for beer always feature a group of friends, usually at a beach or some other outdoor location, smiling and having a good time? This is because the advertisers want you to associate their product with feeling content. They want you to think that drinking their beer will make you feel happy because you’re having fun with your friends on a warm summer day.

Excitement

Bold colors and strong contrasts can trigger an adrenaline rush and feelings of excitement. You can try using action shots and close-ups of particularly exciting details on your product.

The best example of this is car commercials.  They almost always feature the car driving fast, preferably on a winding road or in some other exciting location. They also often use close-ups of the car’s engine or other features to emphasize the power and excitement of the product. This is designed to make potential customers imagine the thrill of driving the car.

Comfort

Are you selling bedding, bathrobes, or anything else that’s meant to comfort and soothe? You’ll want to include soft colors, calming scenes, and models that appear to be in a complete state of bliss and relaxation, all of which will help to make your potential target customers make the association between your product and feelings of comfort. For example, many bedding companies use images of people sleeping peacefully in their ads. They want you to associate their product with the comfort of an undisturbed good night’s sleep.

Luxury

Customers looking for luxury items will respond well to photos with rich colors and sophisticated locations. Featuring close-ups of intricate details on your luxury items will make your customers appreciate the craftsmanship and creativity that went into creating your product. Your customers will understand and appreciate that producing your product took time, effort, and a genuine vision for quality that they won’t be able to find anywhere else.

Less is More with White-Backgrounds

White backgrounds are extremely versatile because they let the product itself be the main focus of attention. They can also be used to evoke a feeling of purity or cleanliness. This is a great choice for products that are meant to be healthy or environmentally friendly, as it makes the product look like it’s something that people can trust.

White-background photography is a good way to highlight luxury items because the clean and simple backgrounds will automatically focus your customers’ attention toward the details of your items. Additionally, they will also associate your product with being more reliable and trustworthy.

Other benefits to using white backgrounds are that they can make your products look larger than they are and help reduce the appearance of wrinkles or other blemishes on the image.

If you’re selling clothing, white-background photography can be a great way to highlight details like an item’s fabric, patterns, and textures. Essentially, white backgrounds allow your customers’ eyes’ to focus on the item itself rather than being distracted by an external object like a model or a prop. Clothing and Product Photography Studio in Los Angeles, California, provides a service entirely dedicated to shooting professional white-background photography for products, clothing, and other types of accessories.

As an e-commerce store owner, it’s important to understand how product imagery can influence customer behavior. By understanding how different emotional triggers work and how to apply the right colors and photography techniques, you can ensure that potential customers have a positive reaction when they see your products online. When done correctly, this can lead to increased sales and, ultimately, customer loyalty.