The Studio Source.com

Here’s some insight from my other life, the one where I design and create work I sell directly to customers.

Last year, people weren’t much into gift boxes. Excess packaging wasn’t cool. This year? Just about everybody is saying yes. They’re spending less, for the most part, but they want the things they’re buying to be special. This year, a little detail like a gift box is important.

I suspect that customer mindset will stick around for a while.

That doesn’t mean dressing up a low-priced item with fancy packaging. There’s an old saying about silk purses and sow’s ears, and a good reason it’s an old saying.

That doesn’t necessarily mean you panic and drop your prices, either. You might be able to break a psychological barrier ($39.75 instead of $40.00, maybe, or breaking up services into smaller, more affordable pieces), but if a price is too low, the thing attached to it becomes cheap. You’re not selling to people who want cheap. You’re selling to people who want value.

People are thinking carefully about how much money they have to spend. They’re thinking about how they can find the best value for that money and still give a gift that will delight the recipient.

They’re getting it right without overthinking it: something thoughtful, that doesn’t break the budget, wrapped with care, because the recipient is important.

That approach should form the foundation of your marketing efforts.

This just in—the economy is a construct.

I know. That’s not news. We usually think of the economy in terms of paycheques and employment rates and the price of electricity and groceries. But the “economy” is like a strange fantasy world where we exchange pieces of paper for the work we do. Somebody somewhere put a value on that work, and we more or less agree with that value. The things we buy are also assigned a value. Sometimes that value changes.

It’s pretty weird when you think about it that way.