In modern society,
pictures play an important role in people’s daily life. On the one side, with
the development of technology, people have more and more channels to gain large
amount of information—internet greatly accelerates this progress. On the other
side, this competitive society force people to gain information as much as they
can. Consequently, the best choice for people is to gain maximize information
in a shortest time—picture may be one of the solutions to this problem. Because
of the limited time, people prefer to get information from a vivid picture,
which spend a short time and more easier to understand. And
obviously, to some extent, compared with our ancestors, people are lack of
patience nowadays. Convenience and high speed are part of features in modern
society. Although it’s very disappointed that long text without photos is less
attractive and seems boring to most of people, it’s true that excellent
pictures get more attention and help a lot amplify the text.
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As a matter of
fact, picture will be a great assistance of companies when talking and
energizing with the groundswell. Obviously, to some extent, pictures are more
persuasive than text. Besides patience, modern society is also lack of trust.
As my last reflection post mentioned, people tend to have a feeling of
resistance to advertisements—they are full of boast, superficiality and lie,
though in most of time, ads actually can get people’s attention. However, it’s
more difficult for customers to believe in text about products’ introductions.
They want to see the pictures. Consequently, maybe more simple, lack of
decoration, pictures of product introduction will be more persuasive. But
compared with introductory pictures, ads still need some visual shock to
attract consumers. It’s true that pictures are also engaged in energizing with
the groundswell. A forum created by company is, basically, a home for energized
customers. As the book Groundswell says:”people believe other people more than
media.” Ratings and reviews help a lot in persuading customers. But pictures
posted by consumers in the forum can make up for the invisible, vagueness and
insecurity that come from not being able to see the products and just imagine
it through some comments. Especially some cosmetic products, the print ads are
decorated by photo shop. Consequently, customers want to know the exact color
of one lipstick by some sharing pictures posted by other customers in forums or
other communities.
Several days ago,
I read a piece of news in CNN, Photographers, embrace Instagram. Instagram is a free photo-sharing program
and social network that was launched in October 2010, which allows user to
share their photos to other instagram users they connect to. It’s very
convenient and particularly, you can apply a digital filter to it. A
distinctive feature is that it confines photos to a square shape, similar to
Kodak Instamatic and Polaroid images. Just as the news says:"Today, we're taking and uploading more than 200 million images per day via Facebook alone” And facebook plays a very
important role in the groundswell. All executives should not ignore this
phenomenon. Nowadays, particularly smartphone becomes more and more prevalent
in the society, which gives a good chance for people to share and connect with
each other.“It's about the fact that technology can instantaneously compress our collective thoughts and images into binary digits of 1's and 0's.”
This is the era of picture. We can’t stop it, just to embrace it. Modern
technology gives us opportunities to share pictures with others. And there is
no doubt that taking advantage of pictures can be a good choice to thrive in
groundswell.
I agree with you completely that pictures are the way of the future of advertising. It's like that old saying, "A picture is worth a thousand words..." but it's all about which 1000 words a picture is saying. As time and technology progress, the masses attention span gets progressively shorter and shorter to the point where we have to compress all our information into short 140 character posts because we are more interested in the visual than the text. I think that is what makes a particular feature on MSNBC.com so popular; it's called This Week In Pictures and it basically gives you the news reel of the last week throughout the world, but in pictures that help you connect with real life, real people and real emotion.
ReplyDeleteI have noticed more and more people I interact with on social media using "Pinterest", where they can flag images of "things they like"; it is interesting in that their selection of images seems to tell me as much about them. I wonder if "Pinterest" data will be mined (oh, I am sure it already is) to examine consumer behavior and what effect it will have on marketing/product design?
ReplyDeleteJoseph
The aesthetic of online sites certainly do play a role in whether or not I choose to continue browsing it. According to a report released by Akami Technologies, online shoppers typically have a four-second attention span. That is how long they'll wait or browse before abandoning a retail web page. It is a result from a survey taken by 1,058 online shoppers. Therefore I agree that photos or images are crucial in marketing. The image you choose to represent your site, will say it all. Often times, when I see that websites are complicated with words and do not have a crisp layout, I will automatically assume that their products are as low in quality as their site.
ReplyDeleteThey say "do not judge a book by its cover" but sometimes that is not always the case. Pictures say a thousand words and its one of the shortest most convenient ways to generate a message. The new ERA of the pictures involvement in the groundswell is on the rise, websites such as pinterest, instagram, twitter, etc. are all created and rised to fame because of the pictures that people are taking. People create their own identity with the images they take and post, thus, for companies this can be a very effective tool to adapt in the future because unfortunately in the majority of the cased we do judge a book by its cover and pictures can say a thousand words.
ReplyDelete