Changing the way clients look at your pricing
You quote the same fee and deliverables and one client signs without blinking. Another baulks and asks you to “revisit the numbers.” Wins come from framing, not the price.
Here’s an example:
A five-person studio quotes $35,000 to help an established business launch a new product range.
The brand’s well recognised, it doesn’t need changing.
The real challenge is helping customers understand the new offer and why it’s relevant to them.
Lead with the deliverables:
a brochure, website updates, campaign graphics, social assets, and the client mentally lines it up against another studio offering the same list for $15,000.
Instead, lead with the problem:
customers need to understand the new products, recognise them as part of the existing brand, and be convinced they’re relevant.
Your job is figuring out how to frame the offer, then work out how to make it happen and develop the communications needed to support it. It’s storytelling from the customer perspective.
Here’s how Don Draper does Framing
Framing changes how clients understand your pricing
The deliverables and fees haven’t changed. What’s changed is the way the client evaluates the competing proposals — a shopping list versus a solution to something they actually lie awake worrying about.
This isn’t a trick. It’s framing, and it’s something designers already know how to do — we use it constantly for clients, guiding attention with visual hierarchy, simplifying complexity, foregrounding the benefit that matters most to a given audience.
DBC’s research for the Costing Pricing Profit Toolkit found the same principle applies to our own fees, and most of us simply aren’t using it on our clients.
It won’t win over every client. But it gives them something more useful to weigh than a list of what you’ll produce.
The take away
Try this today: open your latest proposal and read the first page. Does it start with what you’ll produce, or with the client’s problem and what needs to change?
Greg Branson
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About Greg
Greg’s passion is the research and development of methods that improve design management and the role of design in business.
Greg has developed a series of processes and tools to help designers manage their business better along with a series of workshops that show designers how to use these tools.
Always happy to chat, I can be contacted here.
