Price, speed or quality. Pick two?

If you were to prioritise your next design job (or any outsourced job) by the three needs of speed, quality and price, I’d bet that the order would look like this:

Speed (Need it last week)
Price (I’ve put it off because I don’t want to fork out the money)
Quality (I know it should be done properly, but I’ve left it so long I’ll take what I can get)

The fact is, you can really only prioritise two of these three needs. Let’s think about it. If you need something ASAP, and you don’t have much time, you can’t afford to shop around on price. If you don’t want to pay for a quality product then your job will be put at the back of the queue. If you want a job completed fast and as cheap as possible then you’ll have to sacrifice the quality.

Unfortunately the majority of advertising and marketing campaigns (as in, ‘we need more customers, let’s do an advertising blitz’) are done at the last minute and end up either costing you more, because you haven’t had the time or expertise to get the job right from the planning stage, and will also cost you more in the long run. That is because ‘ad-hock’ marketing blitzes are treated as a one off project and lack the consistency of message, design and follow through of a well thought out plan. We call this the shotgun advertising effect.

You can have all three!
In an ideal world, you will have time to figure out what your message will be, and to who it’s to be directed. You can have an ideal world by putting in the time now. If you have a plan now, then when you need to put out some marketing you will have a clear message (because you’ve already taken the time to figure it out), your design will already be ready to use, and you won’t have to spend money reinventing your campaign every time the market gets quiet.

The other advantage to getting a plan together is you’ll be using it every day, without even realising, as you will be telling customers the same story every time you talk to them, further reinforcing the benefits of using your product or service, thus you’ll have less need for marketing and less quiet patches.

Who’s got the time?
Every client we’ve worked with has approached us and not had the time to invest in seeing what’s working now, and what could use improvement before they do an advertising blitz. We’ve given them the time, as in an extra 5 working days (minimum) we take them through our Brand Inspection, which is a streamlined process to figure out once and for all what is working, and what is not, so they no longer need to waste precious time and money on ineffective campaigns.

In the long term they spend less, have a quick turnaround and a high quality design system to enable them to have price, speed and quality. After all, isn’t that what it’s all about?

Bill Irwin Photographer

Bill Irwin is a photographer in Methven, New Zealand. He captures images both locally and around New Zealand, creating emotive photos.He will be producing hand made canvases of his work, making it available on any scale and needed a logo for his website billirwinarts.com.We created an image for his logo which reflects they style of photos he takes and the colours of his region. The promotional postcards are available from the local gallery and include a tear off business card for the customer to keep and direct them to his website. Logo sub brand Promotional postcards

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Keith MacDonald Harcourts

Logo Stationery Advertising Brochure Visit Keith’s home page www.ushift.co.nz