What does your art business really look like?

How and if we chose to build trust with our buy­ers and clients is a very per­sonal choice, because when all is said and done the way we chose to build trust comes from who we are. Who we are is how we are seen by our buy­ers and clients, how they expe­ri­ence us,  which in turn heav­ily influ­ences whether and to what extent they chose to engage us. Trust is what con­nects inten­tions and image to that of poten­tial buy­ers, a dis­con­nect of any level can and usu­ally does lead to dis­ap­point for the buyer and loss for the artist.

About authen­tic­ity

Before I go any fur­ther I need to make one thing clear… I’m not talk­ing about or sug­gest­ing we need to change who we are to match the per­cep­tion of our buy­ers. In fact it is just the oppo­site we need to be our authen­tic selves and be will­ing to under­stand what that means.

For exam­ple, I’m kind of a shy reserved guy, it is not easy for me to approach a com­plete stranger as if I’d known her since Kinder­garten. If I were to try that approach it wouldn’t be pretty and the out­come would not be good either. So, know­ing that about myself, I’ve learned how to use my traits in a way that helps me greet a cus­tomer or a stranger. By stay­ing true to myself, I can be pretty sure that the right per­son will respond, it becomes a way to select out the clients and buy­ers who I’m most suited to work with.

Trust, expec­ta­tions and image

As I men­tioned in the first install­ment of this arti­cle last week, hav­ing a suc­cess­ful per­sonal brand is highly depen­dent on how you instill trust in poten­tial buy­ers. This is true, regard­less of the busi­ness, because trust and expec­ta­tions are tied to the image your busi­ness projects and its’ posi­tion in a poten­tial buyer’s mind.

So, poten­tial buy­ers who are highly moti­vated by price and not any of the other “human fac­tors” like cus­tomer ser­vice or gen­uine inter­est, will nat­u­rally become repeat buy­ers so long as they see your busi­ness as match­ing their pre­ferred way of buy­ing. This mat­ters because, as a small busi­ness you need to be very con­scious of the image your busi­ness projects. So, if you’re con­tin­u­ally miss­ing the boat in your sales goals you might want to take an objec­tive look at how you’re per­ceived by poten­tial buyers.

The size and inten­sity of your art busi­ness in more instances than not, blurs any dis­tinc­tion between who you are and the image your busi­ness projects. Con­se­quently, reg­u­lar “read­ings” of your business’s image are a good idea. In doing so, try to pay atten­tion to the following:

Perception=intention

Make sure, the way your busi­ness is per­ceived actu­ally matches your inten­tion, it is very easy to assume your buy­ers see one way when actu­ally they are see­ing you the exact opposite.

Trans­parency

Main­tain trans­parency by shar­ing who you are on line and in your inter­ac­tions with poten­tial buy­ers. You don’t nec­es­sar­ily need to “bare all” just those parts that reflect you and will attract the buy­ers look­ing for a sim­i­lar brand. Think about trans­parency as let­ting your buy­ers know you care about them and your busi­ness prac­tices demon­strate that caring.

Con­sis­tancy

Main­tain con­sis­tent prac­tices and ways of pre­sent­ing your work pub­licly. Make sure those prac­tices rein­force your actual val­ues and busi­ness goals. If your busi­ness model focuses on price don’t pre­tend that it is not. On the other hand if your busi­ness model is built on per­sonal con­nec­tion and ser­vice don’t pre­tend it is focused on price.

Mark the path

Give your buy­ers a clear way to become loyal to you, if that is your model, and do so in a man­ner that fits your busi­ness goals. If con­nec­tion is impor­tant and an inte­gral part of your brand then make sure buy­ers and poten­tial buy­ers have a clear path to con­nec­tion at every point they come in con­tact with you and your brand.

Engage

Talk to your poten­tial buy­ers, find out about who they are and what’s impor­tant to them, then use that infor­ma­tion to guide your actions. Talk­ing to your poten­tial buy­ers helps to put them at ease and helps you both begin to deter­mine if you both are a match.

Be pas­sion­ate

If pos­si­ble, show your pas­sion for your work, don’t describe it in purely tech­ni­cal terms, use lan­guage that helps poten­tial buy­ers under­stand how and if your work is what they are look­ing for. Don’t restrain your­self out of fear of los­ing a sale, if you lose a sale because you are pas­sion­ate about your work it’s prob­a­bly good that your work didn’t end up going home with that buyer.

A cou­ple of lessons

Finally, once again I’ll return to the Expec­ta­tions vs. Per­cep­tions point. As I said ear­lier, I have prob­lems approach­ing strangers so when I first started sell­ing my work at art fairs I hid in the back of my booth and only acknowl­edged shop­pers when they approached me. This behav­ior, while keep­ing me in my com­fort zone, did very lit­tle to help a shop­per fig­ure out if what I had was going to work for them. Even worse, nei­ther of us engaged enough to deter­mine if there was a match beyond price. That prac­tice changed when I real­ized my hid­ing pre­sented an image of indif­fer­ence to who­ever entered my booth.

A more recent exam­ple of how this process can work is when I was pho­tograph­ing wed­dings. This time, I focused on let­ting poten­tial clients know and see my vision of wed­ding pho­tog­ra­phy by show­ing them exam­ples of the style I employ. This gave us both a chance to see and deter­mine if there was a match, because we both had a chance to say yes of no to work­ing together. As a result of clearly show­ing how I worked and the style of pho­tog­ra­phy I pro­duced I turned down poten­tial clients, refer­ring them to pho­tog­ra­phers bet­ter suited for them, the same hap­pened on the poten­tial client side. In the end, with few excep­tions, I worked with clients who wanted my style of photography.

A final word

Brand­ing tends to evoke images of “Mad Men” schem­ing to get you to buy what you don’t want. In the real­ity of today’s world and tomorrow’s direc­tion, noth­ing could be fur­ther from the truth. Today’s  buy­ers are look­ing for engage­ment, there is a grow­ing trend towards being known by the per­son or busi­ness we buy from. Star­bucks is an excel­lent exam­ple of this shift, as is the sky­rocket suc­cess of Zap­pos shoes on a cor­po­rate level. On our level, we now have the tools to not only build trust but also what­ever level of engage­ment our mar­ket demands that fits with our style of business.