Showing posts with label era. Show all posts
Showing posts with label era. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Embracing the Era of Picture




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.
www.apple.com
www.apple.com

 
www.apple.com
 

 
To a large extent, pictures seem more important, especially for social media. Because in the groundswell, companies interact with their target audience through many social media tools which pictures help a lot in this mutual communication. When speaking of pictures in groundswell, ads will possibly first arise in our minds. In this blog, I just focus on print ads. There is no doubt that innovation is indispensable in ads creation. All designers try their best to bring freshness, surprise, visual shock to audience, which can leave a great impression on customers. If a company put a long text to introduce its high quality products, almost no one will spend a long time to finish reading in the street, even on the internet. Sometimes, with the development of ads, people will judge products more rely on the surface at first sight. Of course, high quality of product is the key to success. However, if you don’t give others a chance to get closer, how can they get a further understanding of your products?
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.