“They drive me mad!” That’s what my pal said. He was talking about a client’s purchasing department. “They want to know how many how many hours it will take to come up with good creative work.”
The purchasing guy didn’t understand creative work. It happens in an instant. The trouble is the instant needs a lot of preparation and no one can say exactly when it will occur. And anyway, the ‘instant’ has a big responsibility.
Anyway, to banish my vague guilt about screwing up a very nice agency by supporting the efforts of ‘Purchasing’, I turned on the news. And guess what? There’s horse meat in the instant meals. All over Europe. Any cheap meat dishes are vulnerable to being pepped up by the use of some poor old Romanian steeds: cost saving. I wonder if ‘Purchasing’ got involved on this. Some pretty big manufacturers and retailers are having their reputations kicked by sloppy buying.
So now I’m thinking about the whole business of cost saving. Making profit by saving money. It’s what becomes vital when businesses ‘mature’. Growth slackens off. Costs remain constant. Profit margins fall. Supply is greater than demand. And I remember that price and value are very different things.
Here in the US there are huge numbers of cost-conscious businesses. Because in a domestic market this big, one false move can cost a fortune. So big efforts are made to minimize risk. Unfortunately I have yet to come across a company with a ‘Value’ department. I wonder? Could the Value Department deliver more investor success than Purchasing? Because with Purchasing running riot you have a zero sum game. Spend no money and you’ll waste none. Or, put another way, go out of business and no one will take advantage of you.