Nielsen Brandbank has launched a Mobile Ready Image Service to help brands make product images viewed on a mobile look better. The service aims to address the issue that standard pictures used on websites of how grocery products look in real life, don’t work on mobiles.

“They don’t work because the available screen space just isn’t big enough so it’s hard for people to see any detail,” said Nielsen Brandbank product manager, Richard Stanley.“It makes for a tricky and poor shopper experience which partly explains why accidentally picking the wrong product is fairly common, particularly for size and variant.”

Despite the fact that 75 per cent of smartphone or tablet owners in the UK use their devices for grocery shopping (source: Nielsen) and 55 per cent of ecommerce transactions are made on a mobile device (source: IMRG CapGemini), Stanley said the issue has been overlooked in the rush to create the mCommerce experience.”

The key to making images more mobile friendly is removing the normal detail from the packaging and making key details – such as content, brand, variant and size – more prominent, so it still represents the product but has a clearer overall appearance. The common terms for these images is “hero images”.

Figures from Unilever and Danone show the value of hero images. Magnum sales leapt 24 per cent while Simple Skincare and Volvic’s Touch of Fruit range both saw 20 per cent rises when hero images were used. However, Stanley points out that hero images don’t just grow sales but also reduce returns as less people pick the wrong product, particularly if shoppers use the search page to select items rather than specific product pages, “essentially hero images make mobile grocery shopping easier, faster and more accurate.”

In addition to creating the images, Nielsen Brandbank – which collects, manages and distributes FMCG product content, primarily for ecommerce and logistics purposes – will also host and publish them on behalf of retailers and brands. The new service also includes creating images for tablets.