Brand promise: Sharing life’s joy.
(Shutterfly’s brand wheel)
Opportunity : To change the brand narrative from selling photo products to preserving memories.
Methodology: Crafted Shutterfly’s lifestyle and product photography to illustrate the benefit and quality of the products through the brand lens of “sharing life’s joy.” Redefined the product photography strategy for higher-end products like stationery for marketing channels from email to catalog.
There was a time when the online digital-print space was highly competitive, with HP’s Snapfish, Ofoto, Kodak Gallery, Yahoo Pictures and of course, Shutterfly. Shoppers in this category were surfing promotions, and the category had become commodified.
Shutterfly needed to express a brand that transcended the price of bulk photo-prints, and re-position the itself to emotionally connection to customers, inspiring customers by helping them visualize the joy the product can bring to their everyday lives. Customer insights led to lifestyle photography as the first brand in the competitive set to break out of the early promo-centric treatments of stack of prints.
Why do our customer’s take pictures? : The persona work carved Shutterfly’s customer base into four unique psychographic groups, which allowed marketing to consider emotional motivations around picture-taking, thus crafting more potent marketing message and site experiences. The “persona motivations” were then activated through photographic narratives that communicated the benefit of the product in a way the was relatable and intimate.
What do our customers do with the pictures? : Along with the persona work, and qualitative research, we had a good understanding and some validation around the motivations to why our customers preserve memories. But if we really wanted to connect with them through photography we needed to dig a little deeper into how and where they picked up, looked at, hung out with the pictures and photo-books they had printed in their lives.
Bringing it home.
To augment the persona and qualitative work we did a little team research and all went home to take pictures of how our families interacted physically with photography in their homes.
Insight : we observed that there were places where the product was actually a part people’s daily activities. Photos and photo albums were present in very casual and organic environments, on the floor, in the kid’s bed, mixed in with toys. So we built out some visual stories that reflected a more intimate relationship with the products, and the memories held in them.
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Stationery Launch
We reconsidered current photographic methodologies with the launch of Shutterfly’s premium stationery product. First, new stationery lay-down styling. The composition reflects the spirit of the product designs and the brand tone.
Stylist: Katherine Johnstone
Catalog work
As the brand continued to evolve we continued to differentiate through multiple channels and visual executions and test a variety of visual styles. The card product began to have formal seasonal updates with original, custom content (the art and design of the cards) that was based on trend analysis and the competitive landscape. These seasonal refreshes were the basis of the brand messaging and stories we told in the various channels (weekly site updates, bi-annual catalogs, promotional strategies).
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