Images To Grow By- Selling the category means identifying with what people want.

Images of pyramids make us think Egypt, and images of gondolas make us think Venice. Why do these images stir our minds to think beyond their simple content and see more, perhaps even feel more intensely about them than their content alone warrents?

Early next April many of us will pack our bags, our wares, and some sense of industry and head to Las Vegas, the image capital of the world, for the Futon Expo and Specialty Sleep Show. This desert town, which was built on a foundation of gambling, glamour, glitter and greed, has become a major center for trade shows and conventions of every kind. With its focus on imagery, Las Vegas lures us by its collective power to visually excite the senses with full size pyramids, replicas of Italian lakeside towns, New York skyscrapers, Venetian canals, and believe it or not its own Eiffel Tower. The eye gate has always been the key portal to getting people’s attention, keeping it, and then selling them something, or as the case can be made in Las Vegas, just taking their money without selling them anything.

Images are the driving force behind many of the world’s greatest ad campaigns. From the pink panther to the pink energizer bunny we are bombarded with thousands of images as we read magazines, watch our favorite TV shows and movies, and attend the visual feasts of the stage, concert hall and ball park.

All these powerful images are crafted for a purpose. Those purposes range, as already stated, from advertising and marketing campaigns that seek to introduce us to products and hopefully get us to buy, to family pictures and portraits of loved ones that we cherish and view again and again so we can enjoy happy memories of events from the past. But whatever the reason, images are powerful tools that not only communicate their basic content but can also deliver an emotional punch right between the eyes and into the subconscious mind. It is this emotional engagement that gives the image its greatest power.

Why do we attach such significance to images? What is it about that picture of our parents that makes us smile, or that guy saying “Wassup?” on the beer commercial that makes us laugh out loud? It’s all about a common experience I call “identification.” We see, we identify, we react.

Identification is the reason automobile companies typically show you only their car speeding down a desert road. Their car is shiny, fast, and oh so right. Identification is the reason restaurant chains show you happy people eating and drinking with other happy people in their restaurant. The food is perfect, the wine is perfect, and their customers are perfect… hey, “they” are you. Identification is the reason Pottery Barn, Crate & Barrel, and every other catalog and internet merchant spends thousands - even millions - of dollars on great photographic images of their products in action. They take the greatest care to be sure they are all dressed up with somewhere to go, that somewhere being your house via their delivery service.

Images can evoke an emotional response, prompt identification, and make us “feel” something that can drive us to think and even act differently than we did or even could have before we encountered them. Images can become powerful icons that add great value to their creators’ and owners’ brand equity. Images allow marketers to present, establish, gain mind share, add value, and sell products to consumers who judge them and their products by the quality, clarity, distinctiveness, and creativity of those images.

During the past few years the Futon Association has commissioned me and a team of PR Professionals at Shandwick USA to orchestrate and produce photos for the industry consumer PR program. The seven year program, which has had some critics, has garnered some 400 million impressions, at an average cost of about $.25 per thousand. The (PR) industry average is about $1.25 per thousand.

The photos show futon (sofa-bed) furniture in its best possible light. From John Crum’s Manhattan penthouse shots of 1996 to this year’s very cozy, yet very large living room extravaganza from Kreber Enterprises, each shot paints a picture not often communicated by futon furnishings. These are real rooms with real lives of their own. People live here, people rest here, people play here, and people sleep here. Comfort, contemporary style, quality and value were the key threads we tried to weave together for each shot. I do want to acknowledge all the manufacturers who donated their products (and the shipping costs) to help bring it all together.

Bottom Line: Don’t allow yourself to discount any of this because it is the futon industry that created it. Don’t let anyone tell you that these images are any less valuable because they don’t feature products you sell in your store. When was the last time you drove your silver BMW at 100 miles per hour through a golden desert at night? Images are meant to help make a connection with people, an identification with what people feel about themselves and their lives. The images displayed here are designed to help consumers make the connection and identify themselves with an image that feels at home in their world. Images that allow them to see futon furniture in its best possible light. They are images to grow by.