Chatting with a friend last night… I was pondering what he said about clients. It occurred to me that when it comes to photographers… they’re kind of like restauranteurs.
I often have eaten in restaurants where either the food or the service was disappointing. For example, we’d eat overcooked pasta in a local restaurant served on a plate for NT$300. Yet, if I went to 7-11 or FamilyMart, I could walk out with fairly delicious pasta product for a fraction of the price. Indeed, if the restaurant had bought it and served it nicely on a plate… I probably wouldn’t have complained.
So I got to wondering why. It’s actually simple: restaurant owners simply don’t eat out as much as they should. They need to go and see what other restaurants are doing FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF THE CUSTOMERS.
Guest house owners with poor guest house offerings should do likewise. Having stayed in numerous guest houses over the years (we used to prefer them to the bigger hotels because we felt we had a connection with the people there), I’d say that some (or many) often try to charge hotel prices or more but fail to provide the level of services that a hotel provides: no desk-service, poor quality breakfast, bad parking (or none), … and the list goes on.
There is no excuse for not understanding your customers properly. You don’t need to provide products or service the same as you use yourself… but you need to know what your customers expect at the very least. The best way to do that is to be a customer yourself for the exact same service you are selling.
To turn the comment back towards photographers, if you want to take portraiture seriously, esp. full body, boudoir or fashion, you really need to have some idea what it’s like on the other side of the camera, how a model works with the photographer, and what the model needs to do or know. I highly recommend that.