I received an email yesterday promoting a webinar on how designers and creatives can fight against their services being devalued and confront prospects who don’t see the value in what they charge. I smirked when I heard this, because it’s impossible to do as long as design schools and institutes churn out eager kids with 2-year degrees, as long as the industry has no widely recognized credentials, as long as there are few standards that everyone has to learn and abide by, as long as instability reigns when it comes to stable employment in the advertising industry.
The design and advertising industry has very few barriers to entry. Yeah, you might need an uncle who is head of accounts to land a plum entry level gig at a big agency, but really anyone who owns a Mac and knows their way around the Adobe Creative Suite can hang out their shingle and say “I’m a designer. And I’m just as good as anyone else out there.” And it’s the prospect’s job (often a difficult one) to judge if this individual is as qualified as they say.
Other professions have a very high barrier to entry. Attorneys have to go into a couple hundred grand of debt and pass one of the toughest tests on the planet to enter their profession, so it’s no coincidence that they charge so much because they’ve got quite a debt to pay. Same for doctors, and accountants don’t have it easy, either. But they also don’t have to worry about charlatans or quacks throwing up a shingle saying, “Hey, I read a few law books. Now I’m an attorney,” who then charge 25 bucks an hour. In fact, attorneys are so smart about building barriers to entry that just calling yourself an attorney is illegal. Smart people, those lawyers.
This same principle goes for most manufacuring (it’s expensive to acquire land, facilities, machinery, raw materials and then pay people to make stuff, and it’s still costs money to contract it out to China) and even the Internet, where the barrier to entry is often ranking in the organic search listings. Google is essentially the barrier, and if you think you can game Google, think again.
So if you’re in an industry where the barriers to entry are low, maybe it’s time to think about how to build them either for your industry as a whole or specifically for your company. Patents are barriers to entry, but these are also hard to come by. Building a community online or offline can be a barrier to entry, and this might be a good place to start. It’s not easy, but once your barrier is built, you just made it even harder for others to compete with you. The trade-off is worth it.
