value

Restaurants and photographers

What do restaurants and photographers have in common?

When it comes to choosing a restaurant, or a photographer, a consumer in a larger city usually has many hundreds of choices. In the eyes of the customer, most restaurants, and most photographers, are more or less the same.

Why choose one restaurant, or photographer, over another? Convenient location? A positive previous experience? Price? Good word-of-mouth? Maybe the web site looked nice?

Restaurants rely on their menu to entice customers. They usually post menus online and near their front entrance. But compare how restaurants present their menu.
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The four-letter F-word

If you search the web for the most powerful words used in marketing, the most cited word, as you might guess, is the four-letter F-word, “free”. Certainly, the word free can get customer attention but is it really effective in making sales?

The F-word is so overused these days, that we almost automatically tune it out. We know that any e-mail which starts with “FREE” is spam and any web banner ad that yells “FREE!” is a waste of time. We also know that nothing is really free, there’s always a catch. Free will get attention, but it’s never taken seriously.
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Pick any two

Remember the consumer saying: “Good, fast, cheap. Pick any two.”

A similar saying is: “High quality, low price, good customer service. Pick any two.”

Of course, we want all three. But that elusive combination doesn’t seem to exist.

When a customer tells a photographer that their photo fees are too expensive, the photographer should then ask: “Okay, I can can give you a lower price but what do you want to give up, quality or service?”

Customers who only shop price are customers that a photographer can live without. These people don’t value a photographer’s work.

Bargain hunters don’t understand that a cheaper price only guarantees them of getting less for less.

What a photography assignment might cost is always less than what it will cost from not having that photography done at all.

Many businesses don’t realize that most commercial photography doesn’t really cost anything. If $1500 worth of photography helps generate $20,000 worth of business, then there was no cost for the photography. The photography was a business investment where the company put money into itself.

 

Riding along a new path

If a customer needs a package to be delivered from point A to point B, they don’t care whether the courier* is talented enough to ride an odd-looking bicycle or not. The only value to the customer is the ability to deliver the package on time. The customer won’t pay more for a fancy set of wheels or any extra cycling skills because these have no value to the customer.

No matter how talented a photographer thinks they are or how many awards they may have won, it’s the customer who determines the value of the photography. The customer’s perception is the photographer’s reality. Unwanted value isn’t any value at all.
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By the value

Of course the list of prices in the previous post, By the pound, is meaningless. No one sells a house by the pound, no one buys a car by the pound.

A house is priced on the subjective value of its location, the quality of design and workmanship that went into the house and the cost to build.

A car is priced on the subjective value of its brand, the quality of design and workmanship that went into the car and the cost to build.

Yet some people expect photographers to price their services by the hour or by the picture rather than by the value of the photography plus the quality of workmanship and the cost of production.

When some businesses search for a corporate photographer, why do they shop price first, value second? The only products sold by weight or volume are commodities like fruit, vegetables and gasoline. Almost everything else is sold by value.

A can of Campbell’s vegetable soup is 99¢ while the “no name” brand of vegetable soup is 60¢. Which soup would you buy?

After tasting the thin, watery, no name soup, you’d either go back to the higher-priced soup because it has more value, (i.e. better taste and more enjoyable), or you’d lower your standards and stay with the cheaper product to save money.

It’s the same deal with photography. A business has to decide whether to lower its standards and use cheap photography, or go with higher-priced professional photography because of its higher value.

 

Free and worth every cent

Everyone loves free because there’s no risk involved. If a free item is unsatisfactory, throwing it out can be done without hesitation or regret.

It’s free and priced to sell.

Free means you don’t have to make any judgments or decisions. When it comes to free or cheap photography, the low price becomes the most important feature. Good photography? Poor photography? Who cares because it’s free!

I wouldn’t buy anything that I have to pay for.

But viewers of photography don’t care what it cost. They care only about the quality of what they see. There’s a big disconnect between a business that tries to get free or cheap photography and its customers who want good photography.

I wouldn’t pay for anything unless it’s free.

People always assign a value to the things they buy. If something is received for free, they assign a value of $0. For example, if someone loses their $75 sunglasses, they’ll moan, “Oh no, I’ve lost my $75 sunglasses!” But if they lose a free or cheap pair of sunglasses, that person will say, “It doesn’t matter, I got them for free.” The cheap sunglasses are disposable and not worth any effort.

For the photographer who does cheap or free photography: is your work disposable and not worth the effort?

For the business that tries to get cheap or free pictures: is your business image disposable and not worth the effort?

 

Value of experience

You get paid to do what others can’t or won’t do. Maybe they don’t have the time, maybe they don’t have the tools or maybe they don’t have the know-how. In any case, if someone can do what you do, they won’t pay you to do the same thing.

This means that a professional photographer should have better tools, better production values and better abilities and more creativity than their competition and even their customers. But this is not always the case.

An amateur photographer, and maybe even a customer, might own the same or better tools than a professional photographer. An amateur might have the same creativity and ability as a professional.
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