A purchasing expert recently challenged me on our prices for editing - asking me to reduce the cost of our £500 per day edit suites beyond the normal 4-day week offer. We came to an arrangement, of course, because of the amount of time this particular client spends at Oakslade Studios.

But the conversation made me question whether we were really offering value for money, rather than simply comparing ourselves with other providers as being somewhere between ‘low-cost’ and ‘expensive’?

Whether or not a marketing campaign (in our specific case a piece of video) was worthwhile value for money depends entirely on results. These don’t have to be simply “increased profit” - but unless you’re embarking on marketing just to make yourself feel glamorous, whether or not the cost was worth it depends on what the darn thing does to change and improve your business.

Investing in and spending money on marketing relates to the whole ethos of a business. Would you sit down and ask your managing director to breakdown where they spend their salary and work out where they could cut costs? You’d judge them on their performance of course. How well they hit their objectives, how they communicated goals and delivered strategy throughout the business.

The challenge for us, and for marketers in general, is in setting the objectives in the first place, measuring them, and relating them to business issues that everyone has a stake in. In some cases this has to be something as concrete as increased profit!

Tags: investment, objectives, post production, price, value for money

This entry was posted on Monday, February 18th, 2008 at 6:16 pm and is filed under customer experience, post production, thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.