Bryan Carporicci dives into three influencing factors when it comes to pricing your photography. If you have read his first article on pricing, you are in for a treat again. He co-wrote a book for photographers with fellow photographer Robert Nowell called “Pricing for Profit.”
In the book I co-wrote with Robert Nowell, titled “Pricing for Profit”, we share our belief in the idea of calculating your prices based on Cost of Sales. Certainly this is the best starting point, but there are other factors that must be considered when calculating your prices, most importantly quality, perceived value and confidence.
Quality
The quality and artistic measure of your work will have a healthy influence on how you can price your photography. In order to sell something to someone, you have to provide a quality of service or product that the client couldn’t produce on their own. If your photography resembles the basic snapshot-style of images that anyone could take with their own point-and-shoot camera, chances are you cannot charge anything in the neighborhood of what we are suggesting. If, on the other hand, your photographs exhibit a quality of light, posing and finesse that makes your work stand above the competition, then you certainly can demand a premium for your creative fees.
Perceived Value
We have all heard the saying that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and this is true of the professional photography industry. The way that a client perceives a product or service is directly related to the price that they are willing to pay for it. People buy things not necessarily for the thing itself, but rather for the way that the thing makes them feel. This has been proven to be true time and time again in all kinds of business environments.
Perceived value can come from things such as how we package the goods that we deliver our clients, to the length that we will go to to provide exceptional customer service. If you create a higher perceived value for your photography and your products, then you can demand a higher price for those products and services.
Confidence
Confidence is a photographer’s ability to sell him or herself and his or her products or services without any hesitation or apology. It is especially important for starting out photographers, to disassociate themselves from their own price list. We have often heard photographers saying that they would never buy photography at the prices that they themselves charge. As a result of that thinking, they find it extremely difficult to sell to others when they don’t believe in their own pricing system.
You need to be confident and sure of your pricing structure, and you need to present it in such a way that instills confidence in your client. If you don’t believe that they will buy, it is likely that they will sense that. If you don’t believe that what your selling is worth the price you’re charging, they will see that as well. This is why it is important to be extremely confident in the prices that you are asking for your photography.
Next week, I’ll be going into detail about the last “influencing factor” for pricing – the Cost of Sales model. This is the only measurable way to calculate your pricing, and it’s where things start to get fun!
How do you arrive at your photography pricing? What factors do you use to arrive at your numbers? Discuss below!
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- “I Love Photography, Not Numbers” – Let’s Discuss Your Pricing, 1 of 3 - March 6, 2013