Today’s e-commerce landscape is almost unrecognisable compared to how it looked just over 2 years ago. The pandemic has caused online retail to step into the spotlight and become a necessity for many brands. Online retail sales as a percentage of total retail sales were sitting at around 19% in February 2020. A year later, it had skyrocketed to close to 35%, and at the closing of last year had gone up an additional 19%.

Have you ever found yourself talking to a stranger and after speaking to them for a while you realise they are great at storytelling? The way they speak, the way their personality comes through and the language they use to draw you in and make it a memorable experience. Even when you retell the story you think of them. This is a person showing their personality through the way they communicate, so shouldn’t a brand do the same?

According to Google, 97% of consumers use the web to search for local businesses – and if the vast majority of your potential customers are online, you should be, too. Having a strong online presence is a crucial component of your marketing strategy, no matter what size your business is or what industry it belongs to.

Marketing by nature is a broad field of speciality. From graphic design to strategy; web development to SEO; branding to social media management; exceptional marketing demands a business juggle a lot of balls in the air at any one time.

Before we get into it, let us discuss what a brand is not… Firstly a brand is not a just logo, it’s not your fancy business cards printed on that linen paper you love so much. It is not your website, social media pages, packaging, or your sign on your building. Yes, these elements all give a consumer a visual cue of your brand, but a brand is so much more than that.

In a world full of events, photography has been narrating them for as long as anyone can remember. However, narrative is far more vast than photography. Cultural communication is one of the defining characteristics of being human, and stories have long been the most powerful mode for transmitting information. Narratives affect people in many different ways and continue to define us as it is so closely linked with our identity and the way we have grown the understanding of ourselves and the world around us. This being said, as something non-verbal in nature, can photography create a narrative and in turn tell a story? To fully unpack this we need to define the very notion of ‘narrative.’