Building a brand is not easy. It requires hard work, dedication, smart planning, and most importantly, a vision or image for what you want your brand to achieve, represent, and ultimately stand for in the minds of consumers. There is no secret to brand success, nor are there any shortcuts to notoriety and recognition of your products. While nothing is certain, it is indisputable that brand imagery is what separates and makes you different from other companies offering the same products and services as you, regardless of the price.

 One of the most important aspects of launching a product and establishing brand presence, especially on Amazon and other e-commerce platforms is product photography and brand imagery.

Brands that sell on Amazon should consider how and why product photography is so important to listing optimization.

Building a Brand with Product Photography:

Our firm partnered with Kimberly Klein of EcomShoots.com to ensure all of our clients who need help with their product photography and imagery are served at the highest level possible – Klein is a NY based professional photographer with over a decade of experience.

In a recent interview with our firm, Klein stated,

Many brands often think that having a great product is all it takes to succeed in selling on Amazon or other online marketplaces, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Online shoppers do not have the benefit of touching, feeling or trying on an item before they purchase it.

This leaves it up to product photographers like my team and I to capture what makes your product “special” in each image we create. We want consumers to be able “feel” and inherently understand what your brand stands for without physically touching the product. Ecomshoots helps brands create visual content that allows potential customers to imagine the product in their hands.”

Statistics show that Klein is absolutely correct. The benefits of high-quality product photography are quite impressive.

• People can only recall 10% of new information 3 days after hearing it on average. When new information was provided with a picture recall increased to 65%.

• Written content and blog posts that use relevant images obtain 94% more views, on average, compared to articles without images.

• Images on Facebook receive 20% more engagement than videos and 352% more engagement than links.

• 60% of consumers say they’re more likely to consider or contact a business that has an image show up in local search results.

• 67% of consumers say that the quality of a product image is “very important” in selecting and purchasing a product.

• 78% of online shoppers want to see the product as if it’s part of their own daily lives.

• 50% of online shoppers say, “large, high-quality product images are more important than product information, descriptions, or even reviews.”

• 90% of online buyers say that photo quality is the most crucial factor in an online sale, according to Etsy and Justuno.

Protecting what you have Built with Brand Protection and Online Intellectual Property Enforcement

Brand Protection on Amazon, the Walmart Marketplace, eBay and other platforms has so many different components for brand owners and marketplace sellers to consider, but at the end of the day, the law firm of Rosenbaum, Famularo & Segall and our Brand Protection team strive to protect what our clients have built – it is why we exist.

For the same reasons that product photography is so important to building a brand, good content is hard to come by, high quality product photos are often targeted by “infringing sellers” online. Images are often “stolen” and used by nefarious competitors and due to the nature of how e-commerce platforms are set up, it can be impossible to be proactive and prevent this type of copyright infringement.

Still, enforcement of your IP rights is imperative to protecting your brand imagery and product photos are protected in the United States under Federal Copyright Law.

More specifically, copyright issues online are governed by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or “DMCA” – a body of law put into place to help guide copyright law into the digital era and online sales.

The DMCA, under its “Safe Harbor Provisions,” requires what the law considers to be “Internet Service Providers” or “ISPs,” which includes ecommerce platforms like Amazon to “expeditiously” remove content alleged to be infringing a copyright. The DMCA allows the ISP to avoid liability for hosting any content found to be infringing the copyright so long as they comply with this requirement.

Thus, the Safe Harbor Provisions of the DMCA provide copyright owners with a mechanism to report the unlawful use of any product photos directly to the e-commerce platform at issue. Essentially every platform, including Amazon, Walmart, eBay, Etsy, Alibaba, etc. has a specific page dedicated to receiving reports of copyright infringement pursuant to the DMCA.

Our brand protection team uses these tools daily and has unmatched experience in navigating each platform. We have removed hundreds of thousands of instances of infringement from online marketplaces to date.

While the goodwill and recognition associated with a brand is “priceless,” it is important for brands of all sizes to ensure that they are safe from hijackers, counterfeiters, unauthorized or rogue sellers and any other type of infringement online.

Whether a seller knocks off your product, sells counterfeits, joins your listing without authorization, or steals your product images, they are stealing money and sales directly from your business, but we are here to help protect what you have built.