The business side of photography
Many photographers fail to understand that a client’s budget determines their work. In an ideal world, it would be the other way around. But sadly, the ideal world and the real world don’t often intersect.
Don’t confuse “work” with “effort” or “creativity”. The latter two should be independent of the client’s budget. Whether the budget is $1,000 or $10,000, the photographer has to put forth the same effort and creativity.
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When it comes to pricing their work, photographers need all the help they can get. fotoQuote and Blinkbid are two common software tools used.
An overlooked tool for editorial photographers is Editorial Photography Estimator. The free version is still available but not the commercial version which included data for advertising photography. A new edition of the commercial version was supposed to have been released in 2011.
It’s very important to remember that Editorial Photography Estimator (EPE) is from 2001 and its numbers are out-of-date. However, the underlying concepts are still valid. Editorial fees, for both assignment and stock, are based upon the circulation of the publication and that publication’s ad rate for a full-page colour ad.
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The key to enhancing business image and winning consumer trust is through the use of marketing collateral.
Marketing collateral refers to the various forms of communication a business publishes on its own. By contrast, paid placements, such as advertising, are not a form of marketing collateral. Advertising is part of the sales process whereas marketing collateral supports the sales process. To a small extent, marketing collateral might be considered “advertorial” content produced by the company.
Advertising often fails because consumers simply don’t trust ads. Advertising claims are not always backed up by any information. Customers are very skeptical because they know that advertising is only concerned with taking their money.
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One of the more popular ways to insult a photographer is to look at their pictures and say, “Nice pictures! You must have a good camera.”
Here are a few gentle ways to insult a fellow photographer:
The key to helping your customers better enjoy your photographs is to raise your prices.
A 2007 USA study, with the catchy title of “Marketing actions can modulate neural representations of experienced pleasantness”, showed that marketing actions, such as changing the price of a product, can affect consumer enjoyment of that product.
The study used functional MRI to observe the brain activity of test subjects while they sampled differently-priced wines.
The subjects were told that five different wines were priced at $5, $10, $35, $45 and $90. But unknown to them, there were really only three different wines: the $5 and $45 wines were the same; the $10 and $90 wines were the same.
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In the About Us page on this blog, I mentioned some of the ways my pictures have been used. I jokingly mentioned that my photos have never appeared on a coffee mug or mouse pad. Well, one of those has changed.
Often, a company has an employee lunchroom or staff lounge in the workplace. A not uncommon problem is that some employees leave behind dirty cups or other types of mess on a table or in the sink.
Enter behavioural psychology.
As a fun experiment, a small Toronto office has given each of its employees a free coffee mug with their business portrait on it. Their mug on a mug. The office will no longer buy disposable cups.
Since each person now has their own coffee mug with their face on it, the company hopes that the employees will be motivated to clean up after themselves. If someone leaves behind a dirty cup, everyone in the office will immediately know who the culprit is.
The company is wondering whether employees who clean their own coffee mug will also feel obligated to clean any of their other food messes in the lunchroom.
The employees may think they got a free coffee mug but they really got entered into a psychology experiment.
A recent Black Star blog post by Jim Pickerell gives advice to photographers who are trying to licence their stock pictures. He’s been involved in the stock photo business for over 40 years.
Pickerell writes that since there’s such an oversupply of stock images, photographers need to get their pictures seen by photo buyers. He then goes on to list some numbers and statistics.
The interesting takeaway from this article is for any business that’s thinking about using stock pictures for its marketing instead of commissioning its own original corporate photography or business photography.
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