I recently came face to face with one of the major hurdles (and misunderstandings) of purchasing marketing spend; namely the definition of quality fulfillment.
Now, in most cases, marketers want superior quality – it is one of the real drivers of marketing effect – but when purchasing professionals attempt to support marketing in procuring say photography services the definition of quality fulfillment quickly becomes somewhat blurred.
- The professional purchaser wants to buy images.
- The marketer wants to buy superior images.
The problem is that who is to judge when an image goes from useful (it clearly displays whatever object was photographed) to superior (it displays not only the object, but also projects emotions or feelings).
The images that I purchased definitely passed any criteria set by the purchasing department (great focus, clearly displaying the object) yet I was devastated since the images were unusable due to the lack of correctly projected emotions. So what did I do?
Did I blame purchasing for supplying an inferior photographer? Well, no, on paper he was perfectly capable of doing the job (and he did, only I wasn’t satisfied with the superiority of his work) so I bit the sour apple. But next time, I’m going provide a longer list of suitable suppliers – suppliers that I as stakeholder know can bring me the superior quality I demand – and then purchasing will get to support me in the negotiations.
