When considering a potential purchase, a customer will, where possible, compare the price of the product or service to other similar products or services. But when a customer has no reference points to help determine the worth of a purchase, they will usually fall back on two old standbys: price per weight and price per hour.
For example, a customer will often assume that a 5-lb. box of Product A should be cheaper than a 10-lb. box of Product B and that a two-hour service should cost less than a four-hour service.
Many companies don’t have a lot of experience hiring a corporate photographer. This means they may have difficulty determining an acceptable price for professional photography. Is a particular photo commission worth $500 or $5,000?
To gauge a photographer’s price, a customer will often resort to hourly wages. For example, if a photographer charges $1,000 to shoot some business portraits over the course of two hours, the customer might think, “That’s $500/hour! That’s much too expensive!”
The cost of photography should not depend on time spent but rather on value gained. Pricing photography by the hour is like pricing books by the number of pages or pricing paintings by the square inches of canvas.
When assessing a photographer’s price, instead of reducing it to dollars per hour, ask how important that photography is to your company’s marketing plans. If the marketing value can’t be expressed in dollars per hour then neither should the photography.
