Are You Cheap?

by Aaron Hockley on October 12, 2010

Do you compete on price? I’ve been thinking about this since seeing a flyer on a friend’s refrigerator for a portrait studio offering a package for child’s portraits for $9.99 that included the session along with an 8×10.
It’s okay to compete on price as long as you understand the tradeoffs that will happen in quality (both perceived and actual).

Here's My Two CentsWalMart competes on price. They offer cheap goods but there’s a stigma attached.

Taco Bell competes on price. They serve cheap food. It’s all good as long as you don’t mind your meat coming out of a squirt gun.

SuperCuts competes on price. They’ll cut your hair but it’s going to be done by a minimally-paid stylist who is but a cog in their wheel.

WalMart, Taco Bell, and SuperCuts make money. It’s possible to make money by competing on price, but you’ll need lots of volume and the ability to withstand how many folks might perceive your services.

I’d suggest you probably don’t want to compete on price.

Tagged as: business, pricing, value

  • http://twitter.com/davescottphoto Dave Scott Photo

    Excellent point. It doesn’t get much more to the point than that.

    – Dave

  • @photogoofer

    You can blame me for the proliferation of portrait studios in WalMart. I was involved in the pilot program to put permanent studios in Walmarts back in the 80′s. They are now owned and operated by a different vendor now, but we did offer a low-cost product with the “cookie cutter” approach. It definitely was hit or miss with the quality of the photographer you ended up with. However, we did offer a very comprehensive approach to teaching composition, posing and the art (and it is an art) of working with the subject, young or old, to achieve an end result that customers were happy with. I can’t vouch for the current vendor, but the techniques we taught were very similar to those I saw at this year’s Skip’s Summer School in the workshops. The trade off though was the extremely high volume you mentioned. It’s very difficult to keep up the pace of that kind of volume over a long period of time. Hence, lots of turnover!

    @photogoofer

  • http://twitter.com/RoshSillars Rosh Sillars

    One thing for sure is a professional photographer can not compete with Walmart and stay in business.

    The fact is if you want to be successful you don’t want to be known as the cheap photographer. The cheap photographer is hired for the cheap weddings and the low budget commercial jobs. When clients have important clients and large budgets they don’t pick up the phone to hire the cheap photographer.

    Hey @photogoofer… If not you it would have been someone else. You saw an opportunity.

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