What drives your purchases?
Do you buy for the brand or the price tag?
Do you take suggestions from your friends and family or are you a “lone-wolf” shopper?
Does the quality of the product play a factor in your purchase decisions or are you trying to save money by selecting the cheaper product?
Price vs. quality is a common discussion among businesses, more specifically marketers.
We want to know why you buy what you buy.
Personally, I am all about buying cheap; especially when it comes to clothes. If I look at the price tag and I see triple digits, my body has trained itself to cringe and walk away, despite the beauty of the garment that flows off the hanger in front of me.
With most articles of clothing, I select the cheaper alternative; however, there are some clothing categories with which I simply refuse to penny-pinch.
Let’s say you go to Nordstrom’s and eyeball a wonderfully stitched suede blazer that would be a phenomenal staple in your work wardrobe at the ripe price of $150. The price intimidates you, so you make your way over to Aeropostale. You find a lovely blazer that will suffice at the much lower price of $45. This Aeropostale blazer is made from polyester, synthetic material which causes the price to significantly decrease.
A month down the road, you notice an irreparable snag in the polyester blazer you purchased from Aeropostale. A week later, the once small hole looks has infinitely increased, like a meteor wrecked your closet while you were at work.
As you’re mourning the loss of a highly favored and very cute article of clothing from your closet, the thought pops into your head: “If I chose the blazer from Nordstrom’s I would have been better off.”
Why did your mind go there? Well, probably because you now know that you should return to Aeropostale to get another blazer, or you’ll be chilly at work when the AC is full-throttle. Now your grand total from Aeropostale is $100+ with tax not included. That wouldn’t be awful if you had 2 blazers from the purchase, but you only have 1 cheap blazer that will most likely snag in another month. If you purchased the Nordstrom’s blazer, you might still have a staple piece in your closet, and it would last you an awfully long time because, well, suede does.
Let’s take this example and apply it to technology and software. Are you really saving money when you invest in a crummy website provider?
Let’s say you go with website provider A. Their prices are $29.99 per month, and they provide you with a mediocre website platform, which is hardly capable of adjustment to your desired specifications. On the up side, they are the cheapest website provider you could find. When you try to make changes to your site appearance, it is the most complicated process you have ever experienced (and you learned how to use your uber complicated iPhone…). You call the website provider, and there is no one to neither speak with you nor walk you through the process of making changes. What do you do now? Well, you probably end up sitting with your crummy website, knowing sure well you need changes, but not getting anywhere. “Oh well,” you say to yourself, “it will have to do.”
As an SMB, you probably have a small budget.
Before investing in a website provider or any product for that matter your question should shift from “what is the price of this item” to “what is the value of this product to my business?” If the price is low and the value is low, is that really a good investment?
Your website is the face of your company; even more so now that consumers are moving from brick-and-mortar to eCommerce and online shops. Here are a few website statistics to help me illustrate this point:
- “90% of information transmitted to your brain is visual, and visuals are processed 60,000x faster in the brain than text” (3M Corporation & Zabisco)
- “46% of people say a website’s design is the #1 criterion for discerning the credibility of the company” (Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab)
- “60% of consumers feel more positive about a company after reading custom content on their website” (Content Plus)
The statistics speak for themselves: visual content and design is a crucial element to branding your business.
In the promotional product industry, companies are putting their logo branding in your hands. Let’s quickly review the importance of logo branding…
Take Apple and Microsoft for example. Both companies provide technology products for consumers. Their products in essence are the same, but their image and branding are completely different.
If you were running a big business that could at any point be surpassed by a competitor with equally efficient products, would you trust a distributor to provide logo-products with a text-only, hard-to-navigate, overall “blah” website? Or would you trust a website that looked like this: http://www.anwinc.com/
Essentially, what I’ve learned over the past couple of years is that the price you pay is the quality you get. It’s that simple. For some products and services, it is perfectly fine to keep your credit card in your pocket and pay cash for the less expensive item. But, when it comes to your personal and business branding, it might be worth taking a second look at the slightly more expensive product with more features and a sharper looking appearance.
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