Photography and business branding: 5 discovery steps
Last week I struggled in my re-branding journey. In the end, my next step was to take my daughter to the pharmacy. But I ended up doing one better than that - I took her to Indigo Bookstore. It was raining like crazy and a bookstore was just what I needed - to lose myself in beautiful books and try to find inspiration.
My 14-year old daughter loves to read, and this summer has especially fallen in love with it. She registered with Good Reads and set a goal for herself. So when I announced we were going to the bookstore, she was very excited! And that helped my mood too!
I came away with a book, and 2 magazines. It took me a long time to pick them - there were so many but I was really looking for something that called to me. One was a magazine on New Age concepts - think Deepak Chopra. I thought that alongside my vision board, maybe I could use a boost from the universe. The other was a local business magazine that was featuring a local business coach among other successful women. Again, looking for inspiration on multiple levels! Both of these magazines affected me, and in ways I couldn’t imagine - I really went down a rabbit hole. It wasn’t expected but it was both needed and exciting especially after feeling down about everything.
Over the next while I will share what came out of that process and it’s pretty big. But in the meantime, here are 5 steps to kickstart your own brand journey. I touch on several of these in my first re-branding post, but go a bit deeper here into each one:
1. Journal
I have followed Julia Cameron’s morning pages practice (imperfectly of course but it’s an ingrained habit now) since 2018. That’s a lot of journaling! That practice has led me through a lot of breakthroughs in my business as I write with absolute honesty about my hopes and dreams for my family, for photography and for MBP. It came to the point where I was sometimes flipping back to find an idea I had that I wrote about, but with my scribbly writing it was impossible to find! After one painful time looking for something, I took one afternoon to flip through several of my journals (8.5x 11, 100 back to back pages, about 4 journals!) to earmark the pages and take a photo or write the idea into Evernote. Going forward, if I had an idea that I was mulling, I’d make a star at the top of the page and earmark the page corner, so that I could return to it later. I didn’t want to interrupt my flow as I wrote, but at least I could easily find my business ideas out of the larger personal body of work.
You don’t have to commit to morning pages, but journaling somewhere, somehow is a powerful tool for our journey. Indeed, I just made the connection of journal with journey - a place where you’re documenting your path and all the thoughts and feelings that come with (I looked it up - same root French word of ‘jour’ or day." Each day is a journey in and of itself, and a journal either sets the intention or is a reflection - wow I’m going to need to go deeper on this!).
I often tell my husband to write things down. He doesn’t, and his head gets filled with thoughts and ideas that swirl in his own ‘personal cloud.’ When it comes to the technology cloud - can you picture it? Can you wrap your mind around it? No, it’s so vast and faceless and nebulous - stuff just is stored somewhere. It’s the same with our thoughts - they aren’t grounded and they can be nebulous, and they can knock about our heads and make it difficult to not ruminate about stuff. When we write things down it can help make things real, help us anchor ourselves, and most importantly - it allows us to process our personal cloud. When we process, it’s like editing an image and exporting it. A final product now exists and there is room for a new import of images.
In many instances, my personal journaling has been the birth place for ideas that if viable, make it to my next steps of writing in my business notebook where things go to get actioned, or into a tool like Evernote to be stored for future action.
I consider my journal practice to be a non-negotiable. It’s where I have a very important conversation each day with the most important person I know - me. Before giving our time away to family, friends, work, other obligations, I make time for myself - to check in. I’m better prepared to face each day and I look forward to talking to myself in this way!
2. Do a SWOT
A SWOT for photographers is much like the process for any business - it’s a scan of yourself and your context so that you gain valuable insights in how you operate or how you might operate at an optimized level.
S = Strengths: What are you good at? This will help you leverage the best things about you. Are you organized, are you a great public speaker, do you have accounting skills etc. If you were an Accountant in your previous life then that can help your business as you know exactly how to manage your finances.
W = Weaknesses: What aren’t you so good at? This will help you understand where you need to learn more, or outsource. Could be that you aren’t well organized, a terrible public speaker or terrible at accounting. If you never learned a single accounting concept then you may want to hire one to help you manage your finances.
O = Opportunities: What’s around you that you could potentially leverage? Spectacular natural beauty for photo sessions, you know everyone in your small town and they could be potential collaborators?
T = Threats: What’s around you that can potentially be an obstacle? When you know, you can work to overcome. Not so spectacular natural beauty for photo sessions where you may have to find a beautiful private spot to rent (and therefore have to think about the cost but also an opportunity for an edge over others in your area), or you just moved to a new town and know no one (and therefore you need to think about how to make connections)
3. Do a Vision Board
A vision board helps you understand your WHY. Why are you embarking on this, why are you willing to put in the hours? What you want your future to look like. It could be simple or it could be outrageous - there are truly no limits. Stop any voices of “it’ll never happen” - a vision board exercise is a non-judgemental, safe opportunity for you to dream your biggest dreams of what you want to achieve.
4. Do a “Present” Vision Board
I created this product because I understood the power of a vision board and wanted to harness it in a different way. A vision board is an exercise in putting aside our rational, thinking brain and tapping into our sub-conscious; a place we sometimes avoid for fear of what lurks there. It is often the truth, right? When you do a present vision board for business, it’s different in a few ways from a traditional vision board:
You set the intention of your thoughts towards your business rather than your personal and private dreams
You set the intention of ‘seeing’ your business today rather than what you are striving for in the future
The result is that you can find gaps, opportunities or mis-alignments that you may have not previously perceived that could be responsible for some weak areas in not attracting bookings or ideal clients. For example, your business vision board is filled with pastels, but your current branding is strong, bold, solid colours. What is your sub-conscious trying to tell you? Maybe you used a template and it looked good at the time, but it’s not truly what reflects your brand on a deeper level. I did this exercise in 2018 for my photography business and you can find the results here. I’m now in the throes of doing this exercise for MBP and will share results in future blog posts.
5. Do an “inspearch”
My own word combining inspiration with research. Sounds a bit more fun and not so “markety.” Not quite the same as stalking your peers to copy what they’re doing! When I did my brand refresh of my photography brand in 2021 and worked with a graphic design firm, I provided some screen shots of website elements that spoke to me, from a cross-section of many different websites. For example, I found a Harper’s Bazaar article profiling a long list of top wedding photographers who were at the top of their game. I visited the websites of many on that list, to see what resonated with me and what didn’t. That’s important! Sometimes it’s also helpful to know and identify what you don’t like and want to stay away from! I also looked at the sites of musician’s and other creatives that I follow. Out of a lot of different inspiration elements, combined with my other work of the SWOT and vision work, something uniquely me revealed itself in the process.
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