Motorola Relies On 360° Photography to Empower Consumer Decision Making

Motorola Solutions, Inc. (www.motorolasolutions.com), provides mission-critical communications products to commercial, federal, and public safety customers around the world. With a customer-base that includes firefighters and police officers, it’s essential for Motorola Solutions to unmistakably feature the product details that its customers will rely on when using communication solutions that play such an important role in people’s lives.

While holding up a Motorola headset, Jackson Neff, global marketing for accessories and consumer products at Motorola Solutions, explained, “These are very high-tech products. Someone who uses our headset is going to use it every day, and touch these buttons, and use this microphone. The more detail we can provide in our photography and the way we present our products in marketing materials, the better.”

Within a few short months of joining Motorola Solutions, Neff began an initiative to evaluate the motoroalsolutions.com website. What he found was inconsistency in product presentation. Some products had grey backgrounds, some were shot from different angles, and some were positioned incorrectly.

“A lot of our photos did not give clarity to what the product was or how long the cord was or the important details of the product,” said Neff. “I think 360° imagery is really the best product photography strategy to visually showcase the small details that go into all of our products.”

With such a large product line, it can oftentimes be difficult to pinpoint which products should be shot first. By looking at the percentage of accessories that account for high percentages of revenue, Motorola Solutions was able to identify 150 products as priority for its e-commerce website.

Although Motorola Solutions currently has an in-house photo studio with one photographer, creating 360° images at scale would was impractical. Unable to fulfill the workload in a timely manner, Motorola Solutions sought the studio services of 1WorldSync to outsource 360° photography for a large volume of products without compromising the quality of the imagery.

“Going into the scale of this project, we realized that we could not do this in-house—it would have taken us months and months,” said Neff. “We chose 1WorldSync because we needed a company who has the ability to pump out the quantity to keep our e-commerce strategy moving forward.”

“Being on-site at the 1WorldSync studio was a priority for us,” said Neff. “My physical presence helped guide quality control and brand standards, while putting names to faces established an in-person connection that made everything much easier during the shoot. It was awesome!”

What started as a question of “how can we make our products look better?” evolved into a larger branding and e-commerce initiative. The Motorola Solutions marketing team recognized that a complete overhaul of its product imagery was the first step to eventually transition to a more effective e-commerce platform.

“How we represent our products has turned into a larger website standard,” said Neff. “No longer are cords just laid out on the table acceptable. Our brand experts are advocating e-commerce guidelines—starting with quality imagery—that give our B2B customers the same best-in-class experience of household consumer electronics brands such as Apple and Beats.”