The Psychology of Product Imagery in E-commerce
It’s no secret that marketing is all about psychology. Humans respond a certain (and predictable) way to the colors, messages, sounds, and imagery in each of the 6,000-10,000 ads we’re exposed to every day.
The same is true for e-commerce. If you sell products online, not only is your marketing psychology, but everything from your web content to your product images is, too. Until a consumer hits that “buy” button, every touchpoint you have with potential buyers works to position your product in their brains.
Whether you remember Psych 101 from freshman year or not, just think a moment about the psychological nature of e-commerce. How can you use it to make more meaningful and lasting impressions across your buyer journey?
Keep reading, and we’ll spell it out.
Product imagery for more powerful psychology
If you remember 1995, you might remember the first heyday of sales on Amazon. They sold books back then. Craigslist and eBay were soon to follow the e-commerce scene with their “peer-to-peer” sale of second-hand goods.
In the ‘90s, people were still adjusting to the idea of the internet. Craigslist, whose user interface has evolved less than any other site of the same age, gives you a good idea of how product postings looked:
They were few and far between, to begin with They had text-only descriptions And they offered just one low-res image (if you were lucky)
Miraculously, this sales model did work… although briefly. The early adopters of the internet were so enthusiastic about it that they put a lot of trust into the system. It was also before public service campaigns about online seller fraud.
Then, more competition came in the form of new e-marketplaces and wider adoption of e-commerce. The race began to offer a more immersive shopping experience, and websites began the endless slog of continuously outdoing the next guy.
Product images rapidly rose to the forefront of the most competitive e-commerce. All empirical evidence showed that consumers were willing to buy faster and pay more for products they could get a better look at before purchase. In the absence of being able to test, hold, touch or try on a product in e-commerce, images became a new consumer expectation.
More recently, digital experiences like “virtual try-ons” and augmented-reality-powered product placement became possible. Brands around the web have embraced this tech to get yet another competitive edge, and consumers are responding positively.
Though the brands who adopted visually immersive tech have reaped their rewards, we wonder, did they do it knowing they were employing important psychology principles? Or were they just trying to introduce something cool to get good press?
Digging into the nitty-gritty psychology of product imagery and visualization gives your brand the strategic advantage of understanding how to deliberately impact consumer perceptions of your products. This means you’ll employ imagery more effectively and can favor the tech and visualization tactics that will give you a higher ROI (instead of just chasing the next hot thing).
This, in turn, will give you a better appreciation for the consumer mindset when they come across your messaging and other marketing content, which you can better tailor to the state they’re in.
Sound good? Let’s take a look at how it’s done.
Psych 101
According to a behavioral model by Dr. B.J. Fogg, human behavior relies on three basic elements:
- Motivation
- Ability
- Triggers
In the context of e-commerce, product imagery can act as both a motivation and a trigger.
As a motivation, images inspire a subjective (i.e., imagined) sensation related to the benefits or pleasure the consumer anticipates with ownership of the product.
For example, if you see a picture of a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup online, you’ll be motivated to acquire the chocolate-and-peanut-butter confection any way you can, because you feel a subjective sensation of its deliciousness.
There’s a more powerful motivation at play that wise brands have been exceptional at employing recently: environmental anticipation.
In other words, though that sterile, white-background photo of your product is essential for your listings, you also need imagery of the product in its intended environment to tap into the consumer’s motivation of where they ultimately want a product to go.
Sticking to the chocolate example, this would be an image of someone eating a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. The intended environment, after all, is your stomach.
For a more decisive example, professional photos of furniture placed in staged environments have a highly motivational impact on consumers. An even greater motivation is leveraged with the use of augmented reality, where consumers can use their phones to point into the space in their home where they want to visualize that furniture. Then, a high-resolution image is superimposed over the camera’s capture.
Just look at these top five examples of AR used in product marketing to see how it’s done.
Product imagery also acts as a behavioral trigger because we respond favorably to attractive images. 3D renderings, video, and professional product photos all trigger an emotional response. When done right, that emotion will be a driving force in the purchase of your products.
Added Benefits
Visuals communicate information 60,000 times faster than text. They also show your products in ways that text never could.
For instance, let’s look again at the furniture visualization made possible with augmented reality. Buyers are able to place a perfectly scaled and detailed image of new furniture in their homes to confirm how the colors and textures of the piece will play off each existing space.
With this kind of visual and interactive shopping experience, buyers are more compelled to buy, and they do so with better information. This means they make better choices, which also puts downward pressure on your chargebacks.
The best product imagery is also socially sharable. You won’t see users posting about that same piece of furniture by its dimensions—they’ll just share a picture. If you facilitate this sharing via your product listings (and actually encourage the sharing of imagery), you’ll tap another psychological trigger: our sense of social belonging.
Trends in Product Images
Today, almost 23% of Google searches are for images. That said, simply having product images on your listings isn’t enough. To stand out in today’s e-commerce status quo of product imagery, balance the psychology we discuss above with today’s new trending visualization technologies.
The principal technologies making waves are:
- VR
- AR
- 3D
Virtual reality, or VR, has been popular in the gaming world for a time. It has yet to take off in a big way in e-commerce, namely because it requires the user to own a VR headset. However, innovative use of VR while applying imagery psychology set brands even more apart as a result.
Augmented reality, or AR, has seen much greater application in e-commerce. From the furniture space to virtual try-ons for clothing, AR has bridged the gap between the in-store and online shopping experience. Where buyers couldn’t “test” or “try-on” online products before, with AR, they can in a surprisingly satisfying way.
3D imagery can include interactive images as well as product renderings. This all facilitates 360-degree rotation, meaning shoppers are able to manipulate a product to see it from every angle.
There are other visualization trends, too, like “product explosions” (where users can see important internal layers of a product). Photorealistic 2D images still have their place in e-commerce, but now with enhanced properties such as overlays pointing to specific features, or a larger gallery of photos of products from multiple angles (and in multiple environments).
Product visualization is considered the most powerful marketing asset e-commerce brands have. In this hyper-competitive environment, standing out with your product imagery requires tapping into some Psych 101 to the benefit of your brand as well as your customers’ online experience.
New product images come riddled with more complex product data. Aggregating, organizing, and optimizing product data (including imagery) is what our product information management software (PIM) was built to do, so at Amber Engine we know what goes into managing images for hundreds or thousands of SKUs. The cost of not using a new-gen PIM will come to collect faster in today’s more visual-rich environment, so put your action plan in place today.