The relationship between bottled water and agency pricing

The same bottle of water costs the same to make but is priced differently if you get it at a convenience store, grocery chain, or four-star hotel.

What can you learn about that when it comes to pricing and positioning your agency? Are your lower-priced clients that much easier to service than the high-ticket ones?

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Chip Griffin 

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin, and I’m Gini Dietrich, and we’re not going to mess around today. So we’re getting straight into the show. Well, right after this. We are on a tight schedule for recording today. We don’t have our usual time to kibitz and gossip, and rant and rave and all that kind of stuff. So we’re just going to get right into the show here, too. I mean, why not?

Gini Dietrich 

Why not? It’s this is very strange for us. Because usually we spend a half an hour doing all those things you described?

Chip Griffin 

Yes. And usually we sit there and look at the clock, and we’re like, oh, crap. We’ve had a great conversation, it really doesn’t do much to advance the podcast if nobody ever gets to hear it. We should record some of that sometime. Because some of it but probably not all. Definitely not all. All right. So anyway, so since we’ve demonstrated that we, even when we’re on a tight schedule, we can still have some fun on the show. What are we talking about today, Gini, you know,

Gini Dietrich 

I saw on Facebook, a woman posted a picture of a water bottle, and she said, a bottle of water costs 50 cents to make. In the grocery store, you’re gonna probably pay a buck for it in a restaurant, you might pay $1.50 in a really high end restaurant, you may might pay $3, or $5. And I’m really no high end hotel, like a four seasons, you might be paying even more than that. But the cost of the water bottle or the bottle of water is 50 cents. And after I read that, I thought, you know, that’s interesting, because you can have an I talk to clients about this all the time, you’re going to have clients who spend 15 $100 a month, and they will bitch and moan and complain and run you ragged and make you do like $10,000 a month worth of services because they’re never happy. Or you can have a client who pays you $30,000 a month, has has invested enough money that they know they’ve hired an expert or a team of experts, and that they know how to do their job, and they trust you to do their job, your job, they’re not a squeaky wheel, you come to meetings prepared, you showcase results, and they’re happy. And I think about it from that perspective. And I think would you rather have the clients that are paying you pennies and complain all the time? Or would you rather have the clients who pay you what you’re worth, trust that you’re going to do a good job and get out of your way?

Chip Griffin 

Yeah, I think it’s a great subject for discussion. Because, I mean, we talk all the time about agencies having difficulty pricing and figuring out the right clients to work for. And this is certainly a piece of it. And I think there’s two ways to look at what I’m going to start calling the water bottle argument just to sort of simplify things for the rest of the show. So you know, there is comparing one agency to another, and you know what they charge for their water bottles. And then there’s also within your own agency,