How To Buy Creative, The Right Way
More and more we encounter clients that struggle to buy creative services.
For some reason, the typical buying thoughts go out the window when it comes to a creative agency, brand agency or similar.
In a normal example — let’s say a restaurant, you buy a service or good from a brand. In a restaurant, the taco’s are priced at £12 because of the value of the dish. This includes the food, the service, the atmosphere as a total cost of goods.
You don’t really question this, and usually you’re happy to pay for this, because you understand the value of the combined ingredients plus business running costs as well as supply vs demand of the restaurant equal the total cost of the dish.
So why is it any different in creative agencies?
The work should be a combination of the value of experience of the team (Creative Directors, Design Directors, Strategy Directors), together with the demand of the agency to create an overall value of output. e.g this brand or identity for your food truck is worth £20K at market value.
And although it’s a service, a time-based investment (like say, washing a car), it’s still a value. It doesn’t matter if it takes 1 hour or 3 days to get that car sparkling — that’s the service you’ve bought into based upon factors such as reputation, credibility, knowledge, skills, experience etc.
Because otherwise, in a creative agency — it becomes a ‘race to the bottom’.
A battle of time based proposals that are costed up, by the hour. And that’s not healthy for the agency or the client.
So, how do you buy creative services? You just buy them. Like any other service.
