Today's most dangerous trend in the business of wedding and portrait photography is that your customer is increasingly being marketed to by either your suppliers or your suppliers' competitors. This applies to labs, album companies, video product companies, other specialty novelties, and just about every other thing you sell out of your studio. More and more, you will run into clients who want to handle their own final products. This trend is driven not only due to cost factors but by the clients' own creative desires and tech savvy. More and more clients want their photographer to take the images and give them digital files. While this trend may have been started by "pioneers" who were new to the business and would do anything for their first jobs, it has become an expectation from most clients outside the upper income brackets.
In the case of discriminating clients who recognize a photographer's talent, they want the artist to take the photos, and perfect them in digital post-production, but beyond that they are becoming aware of their own ability to order the very same professional prints and albums that the pro photographer always has.
Naturally, many pro labs and album companies do not deal with the final consumer. But a quick and easy Google search will reveal that there are newer suppliers playing by different rules. They are going after your client. While at first these types of suppliers were selling products inferior to your lab or album company, now a whole new and sophisticated crop of companies is appearing with quality that even professionals have to admire. In addition, some pro labs are opening up online labs under a different brand, luring both amateurs and new pros while maintaining the "trade only" policy for their original lab.
Kodak, Fuji, Canon and Nikon all used to fall at the feet of professional photographers. Those days ended some years ago now. By their own numbers, the professional market is now only 5% of the photographic consumer base, and that percentage keeps shrinking. It's no wonder that companies now target their marketing at the final consumer. Nikon is no longer content to advertise only their point and shoot cameras in the general media. Now they want the 95% of the market to believe that they can buy the same DSLR Ashton Kutcher has and take fabulous wedding pictures. The implied reasoning is that the camera is what matters, not the photographer.
Can you really blame them for going after the 95% amateur market? Probably not. In the new world, it is likely that many companies who only go after the 5% pro market will not prosper. The situation is similar to software developers who produce for the 10% Macintosh market. The lure of the massive Windows software market is too hard to resist. That is changing, but it's another story.
From a practical standpoint, what does it mean to you, the portrait and wedding photographer? To prosper, you have to sell your art and your talent. Most importantly, you have to charge for your market value as an artist, rather than relying on the mark-up in your products. If your work is absolutely fabulous and remarkable, it will be worth what you ask. But the time is here that many of your clients will not like it that you want to charge $5,000 for a 30x40" wall portrait that they can order for a few hundred dollars. You will need to charge more for your creation fee and less for the prints.
In the high end market this is different. But average consumers, with tech savvy and fully informed, will force a change in your business model. How can they? Because if you don't accommodate them someone else will. That has always been the law of the market, and it is more so today than ever.
Top quality wedding albums will always be pricey, but your ability to charge a 5x mark up to average consumers may soon be marginalized. We have seen album companies catering to consumers for some time, but up to now the quality has been no match for the old established binders that pros use. Times are changing. Those album companies who do not wish to go after a shrinking pro market see a tremendous opportunity in going after the "Ashton Kutcher" wedding photographers and, more significantly, after your brides.
There will always be a market for the top photographers in their field. Their clients will pay impressive sums of money for their services as well as their products. Other photographers will need to really sharpen their photographic and marketing skills to have a successful business. It will become too difficult to compete against the mass of low-priced, quality products that your client can buy from your suppliers' competitors.
Bill Hitz