Don’t squeeze fees for creativity
Yes, this may be perceived as self-serving, but I assure you, it’s not. I want to explain why small business owners who hire outside marketing services might want to reconsider the often knee-jerk reaction of trying to whittle down fee proposals as low as possible. They are actually working against their own self interest, many times. Why?
Marketing is Creativity, Not Commodity
Marketing services are creativity, not a commodity. A commodity can be bought and sold, and most suppliers of that commodity basically supply the same thing, but with different branding, packaging, positioning, etc. Good marketing is not a commodity, but the product of a creative mind that thrives on getting results. What’s the best way to dampen creativity? You guess it…try to get the lowest price possible.
I’ve been guilty of quoting my fees too low before, and my client and I both end up regretting it. We all have a perceived value for our time, and it’s often based on a real-world value attached to other uses of our time. If I have creative marketing tasks on my agenda, and I underprice one of them, or one of the clients has talked me into too low of a fee, it is really difficult to give the same level of creativity to the one that hammered me as the one that didn’t.
Is that fair? Probably not, and believe me, if I quote someone a fee, I try my best to meet and exceed expectations in return for it. But it doesn’t do anyone any good for a marketer to sit down at the computer to drum up creative marketing strategies, and to have a little asterisk hanging in the back of his mind that there could be more financially rewarding uses of his time on another project. It’s just plain counter productive. It’s one thing to hammer prices for commodities, but remember: It’s not wise to squeeze fees for creativity.
Raphael Guerin