Month: January 2008

It turns out it really is all about perceived value…there’s an article on MSNBC.com today discussing a study where brain scans were done to register the “happiness” felt by one experiencing something they perceived to be high priced (and thus, of high value) versus items perceived to be lower priced/lower value. People were “happier” (albeit for a short time) with the higher priced/higher value items.

A quote from the article:

“It’s very weird, I know,” admits Antonio Rangel, the lead author of the study and an associate economics professor at California Institute of Technology. “But people believe that more expensive prices are correlated with higher quality. So if you believe something better is happening to you, that affects the way your brain handles the experience.”

So what does this mean for your business? Raise your prices to be perceived as higher quality. There is money being spent on creative services out there but it is being spent with more (theoretical) care. Buyers are happy to spend money on high quality creative product…except for the cheap bastards who will always be the cheap bastards and they aren’t worth your time and efforts anyway. To go after the better paying clients, you have got to look worthy. That means great work and the perceived image that goes with. A higher price can actually help build that perceived image.

Just a little reminder that if you haven’t paid your 4th quarter 2007 estimated taxes yet, they are due on Tuesday.

Well, on the good side, at least you won’t lose projects to ChiptheIntern anymore. Now, if a client has a product of a certain size, s/he doesn’t even need a human to make images of it.

This isn’t really bad news. Good photographers, real pros who live and breathe their creativity, won’t even notice the terminal shift to commodity for this low-end product stuff. There are still plenty of clients who want different, unique, creative imagery. So, if anything, this product will help those photographers who have had a hard time letting go of the crap work finally say “no more.”

I just got a marketing piece in the mail that is supposed to represent a group of top-level intelligent people and appeal to those who want to improve themselves (intellectually) significantly. It had at least 7 different writing, grammar, and punctuation errors.

If I had even vaguely considered a business relationship with this group in the past, this piece would have killed it. Talk about a mixed message!

For visual creatives, words are still important, but the analogy I’d like to make here is more about your image selection. Photographers are supposed to make images that make people stop and say “WOW!” When you send a promo that contains anything other than your very best stuff, you’re risking losing potential clients. No one is going to look at a promo piece that visually says “eh…could be worse” and bookmark your site. Hell, they won’t even go to your site!

Will sending your best stuff possibly alienate some of your old “safe” clients? Yes! And that’s a damn good thing! Sometimes the kick in the butt your business will get by losing that old (abusive) bread-and-butter client is the best thing that can happen to you.

Of course, you could just not send to them if you want to play it safe.

But whatever you do, don’t pick images for promos based on what some committee of friends, colleagues, or even clients tell you they like. You pick your BEST stuff–the stuff you want to make. That will give you the best shot at making your targets say “WOW!”

ASMP-SB2 starts in just a couple of weeks! The first event will be in Los Angeles (Torrance) from January 25 through the 27th. Have you signed up yet?

In each location, on the event’s first day, Friday, all of us main presenters will be available for mini-consultations (at a very low additional charge). These are booking up fast in all the SB2 locations, so you really should sign up soon if you are interested in any mini-consultations. You book them when you book the whole event, though ASMP’s website.

Friday evening, there will be a reception for everyone. This will be a great change to get to know the presenters, meet your colleagues, and get schmoozed by some of the sponsors, I suspect.

Saturday starts bright and early with breakfast provided. The day will be full of in-depth seminars by us presenters (Judy Herrmann & Richard Kelly, John Harrington, me, then Blake Discher) with a lunch break (and lunch provided!) of course. Then we’ll hear from Judy again briefly, then the keynote speaker (either Sean Kernan or Joyce Tenneson, depending on the city) will end the formal day by inspiring our creative side. Digital Railroad will then host a reception and the keynote speaker will be available to sign books and chat.

I expect there will be after-parties as well, both Friday and Saturday nights. This is another reason to book now and to stay in the conference hotel–to hang out with everyone and get even more out of the weekend!

Sunday we’ll start with another provided breakfast then jump into our negotiations practicum. This will be great. We’ll look at real-world issues and role-play negotiations all morning. In small groups, we’ll also encourage the participants to offer their own tough negotiation problems for us to work on together. By lunch, you should have some fantastic tools for the next time the client offers a lousy contract or questions your estimate.

After another provided lunch, we’ll break into the smaller workshops. Participants will choose two from the 4 offered by me, Judy, Blake, and John. This way you can drill down in the area you most want help. If you want learn how to do your own marketing plan, sign up for my workshop. Is your website lame? Take Blake’s. John will cover improving your business workflow and Judy will help you plan your business/career and your future more clearly.

By the time Sunday night rolls around, your brain will be reading “Full!” I’m sure. 🙂

For most people, that will be the end of the event, but for me, I will be staying an extra day in each city to offer one-on-one meetings–I call them On the Road Test Drives. You do not have to attend SB2 to sign up for one of the OTR Test Drives with me (though I really encourage everyone who can to attend). These consultations will be 50 or 110 minutes in length and you book them directly with me. There are more details here. I do still have openings in each city, but some places are starting to get tight!

So, get off your duff and sign up for SB2 already! And when you’re at the event, please make sure to introduce yourself to me–it will be great to get faces to go with the names!

Intuit said it was fixed, but it wasn’t completely. They’ve released a new update that is really supposed to fix it. More here:

http://www.macworld.com/article/131397/2008/01/quickbooks.html

Want a little (okay, twisted and Canadian) insight into what it’s like to be a creative in an agency? Check out this comic. Make sure to view some of the past entires as well. And be careful drinking and clicking as you may end up with sinus-filtered liquids on your Mac.

The new year means, among many other things, that I start a new folder of business stuff for the year. My 2007 business folder was automated to back up to an off-site server whenever I typed a simple command into Terminal, but for the new folder, that would have to be changed. Trouble is, I use my Mac as a tool and know nothing about things like nano (at least I knew it wasn’t an iPod reference) and other Terminal-ish stuff.

So I emailed my tech support guy. In my case, that is luckily my brother and he immediately sent me the changes. They were incredibly simple to do in the end, but I required something like 8 emails between us and a phone call to walk me through the process before I got it right.

This is a very small example of where hiring other professionals makes great sense. I should not, ever, do anything tech-ish with my Mac. If it needs to be done, it is a much better idea for me to hire a pro (even if that is my brother) to do it than to try and learn it myself. I do not need to know what “nano” is or “rsync” or whatever.

You photographers need to learn when to let go too. Now, it may make sense for you to learn more tech stuff than I need to because of how you need to use your machines. But it does not makes sense for you to learn, for example, how to use some website building application. Why? Because you don’t *need* to know that information. Knowing how to use the app doesn’t mean you can build an effective and well designed website; just like a dentist knowing all the technical details for how his Canon EOS-1Ds Mark III works doesn’t mean his images will be great.

Learning things you don’t really need to know is often a way to get in your own way of success. We think that by learning how to build a site we can save ourselves money by doing it ourselves or that we can style our own shoots or that we can design our own promos. But in all of those cases, you will end up with results that will not be as good as if they were done by a pro. Worse yet, you will spend much more than than you think doing these things, time you could better spend shooting new work and exploring your vision or making calls or researching new targets, and your time costs you money!

You are not free. Your labor is not free. Your thinking is not free. It either costs a client or it costs you whenever you do anything in your business. It is much better for your business for you to hire a pro than for you to do tasks for which a pro is better suited. You will end up saving money. The end result will also probably be better.

This is also true for a lot of your general marketing tasks. If you don’t make calls or don’t get your mailers out on schedule or don’t update your lists, etc., regularly, then you should consider hiring a Marketing Assistant to do that work for you. Let’s say you hire an MA for 5 hours a week at $15/hour–that’s $75 which we’ll add 50% to cover hidden costs related to having an employee (though that is probably much higher than necessary if you are not offering healthcare insurance)–$112.50 a week. Isn’t not having to screw around with labeling and mailing and updating lists and making calls, etc., worth it? Couldn’t you find better ways to spend those 5 hours yourself?

Let go of the stuff you don’t need to do yourself. You’ll business will thank you.

People ask me all the time what everyone does–emails, mailers, etc. They want to know exactly what other photographers’ pieces look like and ask questions about specific results for each piece. They do this so that they can emulate what others have done successfully.

I think that’s a really bad strategy. In fact, I think it is so bad that I do not show examples of photographers’ marketing pieces (generally) when I lecture. Why? Because too many photographers lock in on that one piece with the success story and try to copy it. I’m not kidding…I used to show examples and then later I would get emails with new promo ideas that looked EXACTLY like what I showed.

Here’s the trick: Do your own thing to get noticed.

Look at these examples of innovative business cards–notice how different they are (mostly) and how compelling they are? Several are photographers’ cards (yea!) but they don’t look at all the same. I’d bet dollars to donuts they were all created by professional designers and not a photographer playing with a Mac. They also all have a concept (some are stronger than others, of course, but still). One concept. And one that clearly defines that company or person.

That’s what you need to do for your marketing materials–conceptualize and execute in a way that best represents your business. Don’t look at those examples and say “I’m going to do a metal card like Duffy’s!” or “I’ll do the folded card thing like ‘Scott’ did” but rather be inspired to originality by these examples.

Maria Piscopo has another great article in Communication Arts (if you don’t subscribe, you should) and it is also available online. This one is about email marketing and it makes some very important points–like that you have to offer something more than just a promo to make it work best for your business.