Market Research

Who is my market?
What am I selling?
What do they expect to see?
These are all questions I need to keep in mind when I am working as if I do not have an idea of who to aim towards my photography will not be seen by the right people and I may represent myself wrong.
I have done some research on marketing and I found an article that told me I should build a client profile:
What do I want to be working on?
For what purpose?
I need to be able to answer these questions in depth before I can start to market myself appropriately.

Who is my market?

I think that I have two different markets one for retouching and one for working in the studio although they overlap together. My main retouching market is advertising brands and product companies, but I can also work in studios doing touch ups and using my skills as a digital technician. Working in studios would hopefully give me opportunities to continue my creative retouching style and expand my skills. If I aimed myself at a studio this would also be part of my target audience for being a photographer. Marketing myself as a photographer means I would be focussing my attention to family photographs and event photography, I would be aiming myself more towards parents and making sure that I fulfilled their needs and expectations. In my experience it is mostly mothers and female members of the family who request family photographs, I have not been asked by one male member for any photographs, it was also the bride who asked about the wedding and the woman who wanted to book me for the 50th Celebration. This is going to have a significant impact on how I market myself and how I choose to represent myself. This is going to refer back to the research I did when I looked at branding myself and looking at colours that both genders prefer, as I will be aiming myself towards women but not excluding men.



What am I selling?

I have also sat down to think about this and what it means to me; I am marketing myself with two separate yet overlapping skills; I am going to be marketing myself as a Retoucher and a Studio Photographer. My skills and services as a Retoucher will also be useful and transferrable to working in a studio. My retouching services include

- Touch ups (or ‘airbrushing’)
- Clipping path
- Background clean up
- Colour editing
- Compositing
- Printer


All of these are useful in the studio. As a studio photographer I am going to be marketing myself as

- Family photographer
- Event photographer
- Wedding photographer
- Pet photographer
- Printer
- Coordinator
- Organiser
- Creative Consultant

I am selling all of these services and skills when I am marketing myself but clients only see the final images, they only understand that they are paying for the final prints and do not understand I am going to be charging them for behind the scenes costs as well as their prints.



What do they expect to see?

People come to photography with certain preconceptions and sometimes misconceptions about what happens and what to expect. As a studio photographer people expect the camera to ‘look’ a certain way; they expect to see the big black DSLR’s, I can understand preconceptions as if I had hired a studio photographer I would not understand if they turned up expecting to shoot with an Iphone. Often studios also have more equipment than they need to have equipment surrounding the shoot and make the studio look and feel like a studio, and they set up lights on stands when there are other options because people like to feel they are receiving the ‘studio experience’ they want to feel like what they have paid for is worth it and if they enjoy the experience of having their photographs taken they will be happier with the prints and be more likely to recommend the studio to other people.
I know of two studio spaces that use this technique, and even if the extra equipment is never used or touched it builds up the atmosphere and the clients prefer this.