How to audit whether your images truly represent your brand

A library can contradict the brand story

A consultancy says it combines experience, collaboration, and new perspectives. Yet its articles nearly always show a young person at a laptop; leadership photography repeats one type of scene, while older people appear only as passive customers.

Automated face counting will not solve this. Representation also depends on role, authority, context, framing, and the story the collection tells as a whole.

Do not infer identity from appearance

Do not use visual recognition to assign gender, ethnicity, disability, orientation, religion, or other sensitive characteristics. An image cannot reliably tell you how a person identifies. Processing such information may also carry ethical, privacy, and legal consequences.

When a characteristic is relevant to the project, use information people have provided voluntarily for a defined purpose and audience. Involve the people represented and suitable specialists. Do not turn a sensitive label into an organization-wide search filter.

Design an audit around real questions

Start with a sample, such as covers, campaigns, and decks published in the past six months. Define observable questions:

• Who speaks, decides, creates, leads, or receives help?
• Are people shown doing meaningful work or merely posing?
• Which ages, settings, bodies, and forms of collaboration are absent?
• Which clichés represent technology, success, or creativity?
• Does the setting resemble the clients and markets you serve?
• Which assets are stock, and which document real work?

Two reviewers may interpret an image differently. Record disagreement instead of forcing false precision.

Example for a B2B agency

The agency reviews 60 recent pieces and observes that strategy is nearly always shown in a boardroom, while production appears as isolated people at screens. It does not publish a claim such as “80% of our images misrepresent us.” It writes a verifiable finding: the library lacks approved scenes in which clients and the creative team make decisions together.

That finding becomes a brief:

• document a real workshop with the client's permission;
• include frames showing participation rather than staged poses;
• produce landscape, portrait, and detail formats;
• record consent, credit, and permitted uses;
• validate the selection with people close to the depicted context.

Keep the audit connected to production

Assign an owner to every gap and decide whether to reuse, commission a shoot, or change editorial criteria. Review the collection each quarter or campaign, not just one image at a time.

Measure actions: gaps addressed, briefs changed, assets retired, and collections updated. Avoid a single “diversity” or “brand alignment” score; it hides nuance and can reduce people to a decorative metric.

Before reusing identifiable people, also review consent, rights, and traceability.