LENSHOOD was one of those names that once we thought of it, it just seemed so obvious, why hadn’t we thought of it sooner, as it brought together the very core of what we were trying to achieve perfectly PHOTOGRAPHY + COMMUNITY
We spent weeks staring at a white board covered in scribbles & postit notes, then one afternoon I had an aha moment as my eye travelled from one side from a list of community words to the other with photographic terminology, jargon & phonetic spellings, the word lens caught my eye… lens+neighbourhood sat side by side in my head & LENSHOOD was born
Some of us have spent decades in the branding & marketing industry, auditing numerous aspects of our clients businesses, interviewing employees & their customers, outputting reams of documents, that in turn end up as scribbles & posits on whiteboards, before distilling those findings into values that represent their business. It’s one of those things that’s very difficult to do on yourself or your own business, ideally you need someone from the outside that can give you an unbiased & new point of view & often ask the hard questions you can’t or dare not too
We have an unwavering mission “create a photography community for those with a passion for quality photography to connect & share their skills & experiences”
So it was incredibly satisfying when we finally came up with LENSHOOD, especially after we’d only had positive feedback from those we ran it by, all who thought it perfectly represented what we are trying to achieve as much as we did!
For anyone interested (as you may find them useful for yourself), below are the 10 steps we used when developing brands for our clients (& yes in that order)
1 Mission: goal, purpose
2 Vision: strategy, how you do it
3 Core Values: your compass, what’s left when stripe away everything else
4 Unique Selling Point: competitor differentiators
5 Emotional Selling Point: how you make your audience feel
6 Brand: how you’re perceived by others, what they think & say about you when you’re NOT in the room!
7 Tagline: re-enforces your vision to your audience
8 Name: whatever works, it can be descriptive or abstract, as long as it’s memorable & distinctive!
9 Identity: visual, audio, voice
10 Logo: like the name, whatever works, descriptive, abstract, but must stand out amongst your peers & be unique
