The com­mer­cial laws of sup­ply and demand essen­tially dic­tate that the more com­mon a product or ser­vice, the cheaper it costs to buy. Con­versely, the scarcer a com­mod­ity becomes, the more expens­ive it becomes to acquire.

Laws of Sup­ply and Demand

This demand is often inflated or deflated by changes in fash­ion, ease and cost of pro­duc­tion and dare I say it; tightly con­trolled sup­ply chains (think dia­monds or oil pro­duc­tion if you need examples of this).

It’s basic eco­nom­ics with prin­ciples that should be famil­iar to all read­ers of this blog (apo­lo­gies to my North Korean read­ers here).

Closer to home; over the last 10 years, the UK has seen Inter­net access prices fall dra­mat­ic­ally with high-speed broad­band now being given away by some ISPs free as part of a tele­coms bundle. It’s not that may years ago that dial-up was the norm’ with a £10 per month sub­scrip­tion fee AND a 10p per minute con­nec­tion fee being levied for a 56K dial-up access ser­vice! A com­pany I worked for back in the early 1990’s was pay­ing £25K per year for a 2Mb leased line into its offices which was con­sidered to be fast!

Seems incred­ible doesn’t it when most homes in the UK, now have access to at least a 2mb con­nec­tion for less than the cost of their daily newspaper?

That’s what mar­ket com­pet­i­tion does for a ser­vice that is now con­sidered to be a “must-have com­mod­ity” by many people.

The same can be said for web host­ing, domain names, com­puters (now less than the aver­age weekly wage each) and the once revered mobile phone. The list goes on!

When com­mod­it­ies that we come to depend upon, like a reli­able Inter­net con­nec­tion or robust web host­ing, have a stead­ily redu­cing pur­chase cost, we don’t neces­sar­ily value them in any other way either. That is until they are taken away from us.

BOGOF

In sales it’s a com­mon strategy to give some­thing the cli­ent val­ues highly, but costs very little for the pro­vider to sup­ply; away for free by way of a “car­rot” on the end of “stick”, to help close a deal.

There’s lots of examples of this pro­mo­tional tech­nique knock­ing around; “1 years free insur­ance with each new car”, “12 months web host­ing with each web­site”, “free 2 hour con­sulta­tion”, “buy one get one free (BOGOF)”, “free laptop with every 18 month mobile con­tract”, “free month’s trial” You get the idea!

The down­side of this strategy, par­tic­u­larly if under­taken across a whole industry; is that it soon becomes a stand­ard offer­ing. I.e. it becomes ‘nor­mal’ and the con­sumer comes to expect it. So when the time comes to draw the pro­mo­tion to an end by remov­ing the offer or apply­ing a price to the form­ally ‘free ser­vice’ then prob­lems begin.

Free Visu­als

The graphic design industry is one of many indus­tries that suf­fers from this situ­ation. In the design sec­tor it’s com­mon prac­tice amongst agen­cies to offer “free visu­als” as part of the pitch to the cli­ent. By offer­ing free design work for a par­tic­u­lar client’s brief as part of their sales pitch to them, an agency is able to demon­strate their cre­ativ­ity and abil­ity to do the job for the client.

I can see the think­ing behind the concept. How­ever, the prac­tice is so com­mon place that many cli­ents don’t value the work that has gone into such design work; which can eas­ily occupy sev­eral days of stu­dio time for zero rev­enue. Fur­ther­more cli­ents used to this approach, have now come to expect it from all design agencies.

A clas­sic example of a high value ser­vice (which design work is) being deval­ued to zero through “give away” sales practices!

Buck­ing the Trend

Smal­ler agen­cies and freel­ance design­ers can ill afford to give sev­eral days of design work away free of charge on the off chance that they may be awar­ded a job in prefer­ance to a lar­ger agency which enjoys a large, in-house design stu­dio con­tain­ing banks of design­ers look­ing for some­thing to do.

So its nice to see a trend amongst the smal­ler design agen­cies who are start­ing to prac­tice a “No Free Visu­als” policy.

“Yes Mr. Cli­ent we can do some pre-contract design work, how­ever it’ll be classed as one off bil­lable work. Is that okay?”

Inev­it­ably the answer to this ques­tion is likely to be a resound­ing “No” from the cli­ent with the sub­sequent loss of pitch­ing oppor­tun­ity. How­ever, a decision by the agency needs to be made: do they spend their days work­ing for noth­ing, or do they con­cen­trate their efforts on fee pay­ing clients?

In other words, do they value their worth? If yes, keep chip­ping away!

Spend time ana­lyz­ing your own busi­ness and what you spend your time on. If you find you’re spend­ing to much effort giv­ing away your valu­able time or expert­ise for free, then per­haps its time you star­ted to “value your worth”.

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