برچسب: Automating

In a world where oil is
finally more expensive than printer ink and Old Mother Hubbard appears to be
running the world’s supply chains, never in the history of ever has it been so
important to look after those who continue to buy our work. Even more so when
those buyers continue to buy our work during a cost of living crisis amidst a
global economy that makes those self checkout machines at the supermarket
scream unexpected item in the bagging area if you buy anything other than own
brand discount tin foil.

I don’t know if it’s just me
that’s noticed that the world seems to have changed dramatically since the
pandemic. Everywhere you go you are forced into utilising some sort of
technology that automates a response that you would have once expected to be
performed by a human.

Another thing I noticed is how
good manners seem to have been thrown out of the window alongside the discarded
wrappings of fast foods, and it’s not just young people any more. It’s young people,
old people, and normal-aged people (53 year old males who identify as Geeks).

Three years living under the
covid cloud confronting the fragility of our existence, and an acceleration of
automation that meant we didn’t have to consider the feelings of a bot, I think
it’s fair to say that huge numbers of people are feeling disenfranchised from
the very premise of society and presence, and then we’re told we can no longer
speak to another human and we need to press 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6, to join a
queue.

Automation was already nearing
hair pulling levels of frustration before the pandemic but then we spent the
best part of two years singing the virtues of non-contact shopping. The most
primordial of human instincts kicked in, and along with our need to survive, the
online shop with delivery to your doorstep, an activity which could be
completed without feeling awkward about not opening the door to the delivery
driver, became the flavour of the day. Just leave the shopping right there
buddy and take three steps back, I need to spray it with my alcohol based spray
first.

If a few years of eating alcohol
tainted bananas wasn’t enough, phone lines were replaced almost overnight with
chatbots that kept you waiting for half an hour while you shouted in capital
letters as you typed, “I WANT TO SPEAK TO A HUMAN”, and with the pandemic not
quite over but certainly over in enough people’s heads to make you feel like an
outcast if you continued to wear a face mask, I think we’re now at the point
where we need to switch some of that automation off and finally take off the
discount tin foil hats.

Fry and Fry Again by Mark Taylor

According to some report or
other I looked at the other week on the internet, 3% of the world’s population
enjoy speaking to Chatbots and the same people also favoured contactless
shopping. I’m not sure who those three percent are but they certainly shouldn’t
be going outside and nor should they ever be put in the precarious position of
being in the same room as a sharp object without adult supervision. I can hand
on heart say that I have never knowingly met a three percenter, or at least one
that will admit to their deep admiration of a chatbot, I mean it’s just weird.

The rest of the world might be
eager to utilise the services of ChatGPT and fully automate their workflow, me
on the other hand, well I’m of the breed that doesn’t very much care for it. To
put some context around this, as we, or certainly I, discussed in my last
musings, I have worked with AI for years and I still stick by my words in that
it’s not yet mature enough to trust, and it’s dangerous enough to know that we
should never trust certain elements of the population to go anywhere near it,
even if it’s only the AI platforms they’re happy for us to see, you should see
what’s in the lab.

Give me time and I’m sure I
will eventually see the light, but right now, after a couple of years of
avoiding people-ey situations, I would rather have a little bit of social
interaction. Not too much because, well, people, but enough to at least go home
with a product that I didn’t feel I had to earn through pressing random numbers
on a dial pad and hoping that the right thing was in the right box when it
finally turned up.

I’m all for change, mostly it
can be a force for good to coin a much overused cliché, but there are some
things that really don’t need too much change because as the old saying goes,
if it ain’t broke, you don’t need to fix it, and once again I find myself using
another overused cliché, but face to face interactions really aren’t broken in
our business.

So, I’m making a pact with all
of my regular buyers right now. I am not going down the road of mass-automation,
nor am I introducing chatbots, and I certainly won’t be having some AI presence
write all of my blog posts, journalists and real authors are becoming rarer
than Panda’s lately. Note to editors here, a months long media course and paid
access to ChatGPT does not a journalist make, and yet I find so many articles
lately that are clearly the ramblings of an hallucinating AI bot.

The breaking news is that I’m
changing the way I run my business by remaining just as I am. If a buyer wants
to talk to me about my process, the weather, my views on if now is the right
time to change the UK government (it is and has been for the past 13-years..),
or the buyer just wants to have a proper cup of coffee with me that’s served in
a ceramic mug, then I’m all in. Even better if they want to pay me in cash or
vintage computers and old magazines in exchange for my art. I’m not a fan of a
bank that prevents me from walking through a set of physical doors so that I
can complain to a real human.

So yes, my business is
changing. The change here though is that I’m not going to get sucked into a
world where communication is no better than the T9 predictive text that used to
be on my original Nokia phone (still with plenty of charge all these years
later). I’m changing in a different way to every other business I hear about and
I’m going to continue doing things the old school way. How’s it going? Well,  I’m talking to clients face to face, and frankly,
business has never been better.

Endless Path by Mark Taylor

There is another reason for me
not to take that immediate leap and go all in on fully automating my business at
least not just yet, and that’s because my current collector base actually
prefer the old way of doing things. I know this because I asked them on our
regular Teams catch up.

We have a huddle once a month
where we put the world to rights and mostly end up reminiscing about the 80s.
It’s the monthly event that brings my collectors together and it’s also where I
showcase a couple of new works like it’s some virtual retro Tupperware party.
Good fun, and I nearly always get a sale, especially if I display public
admiration of their wine drinking capability.

What I found out the other
Sunday night was that they like a coffee and a chat while deciding what piece
of art to buy, they also like it when I treat them like rock stars even if
they’re only buying a sticker or a greetings card and I suspect the clients of
many other independent artists are just the same.

As artists we’re not in the
business of selling off-the-shelf widgets and that is probably why as creative
types we need to think a bit differently to almost every other business out
there. It makes sense to automate a subscription service or when you only sell
widget-like things, but the sale of art involves the triggering of emotions, an
interaction and connection between the artist and the buyer that runs far
deeper than a tweet.

That said, going all in with
the technology and automating much of the process will work for many
businesses, I think the art world is unique enough to warrant a dual approach
between the old way and the new. Not least that there are many art buyers who
still yearn for the “experience” of buying art rather than only the
transaction.

Throughout art history, the
sale of art has been a fundamental aspect of the art world. As artists we create
works that are not only expressions of our creativity but also commodities that
can be bought and sold. The ways in which art has been sold have varied over
time and across cultures, mostly reflecting changes in the economic and social
context of the art market but the fundamental principles have always remained
the same.

In ancient times, art was
often created for religious or political purposes, and the artists were
commissioned by rulers, temples, or wealthy individuals to create works that
reflected their power and status. These works were not necessarily intended for
sale, but rather as symbols of authority and wealth.

However, some ancient cultures
did have marketplaces for art, such as the Greek agora, where sculptors and
painters sold their works to the public. Imagine if you will, a physical yet
antiquated version of Etsy, set up in a cobbled street with the buyers wearing  a peplos or chiton and a cloak which
would have been known as an himation. Not unlike some of the art and craft
fairs that we visit today to buy mass manufactured incense sticks and salt
lamps.

We do seem to have lost our
way with many of these popular monthly local art and craft fairs of late
because most of them seem to be filled with sellers hawking product they could
have got in bulk from Ali-Baba. Town councils in their desperation to bring
people back to the high street set these things up and call them artisan
markets but never consult with the local arts community to figure out the
meaning of artisan. If I were to set one up, I would hope the bar to openly
trade might be set a little higher than a physical version of Wish dot com.

Like I say, I am old school.
When I visit a local artisan market I like to buy random stuff made by artisans
and I like the conversation and occasionally the banter. I’m the same when I
visit an art gallery, I don’t want to see a collection generated by AI from the
stolen art of others, I want to know that an artist spent at least 20 minutes
creating something after spending 20 years working on their craft. That’s how
it as at one time. Physical events, professional artists, and not a bot in
sight.

During the Renaissance in
Europe, the rise of the merchant class led to a significant increase in demand
for art, as wealthy patrons sought to display their status and cultural
sophistication. The artists of the time, such as Leonardo da Vinci and
Michelangelo, were often employed by these patrons to create works for their
personal collections. However, there were also markets for art in public
spaces, such as the Piazza del Popolo in Rome, where artists could sell their
works directly to the public. Once again, this would have been a period in
history where it would have been possible to buy hand crafted artisan products,
rather than mass manufactured incense sticks and salt lamps.

In the 18th and 19th
centuries, the rise of the art market as we know it today began to take shape.
Auction houses, such as Sotheby’s and Christie’s, were founded in London in the
mid-18th century, and they quickly became important players in the sale of art.
Private galleries also emerged during this period, and these allowed collectors
to view and purchase works in a more controlled setting.

In the 20th century, the art
market underwent significant changes due to the emergence of new art movements
such as modernism and conceptual art. These movements challenged traditional
notions of what art was and how it should be sold. As a result, new types of
galleries and art fairs emerged which catered to these new forms of art and
provided a platform for emerging artists.

Today, the art market
continues to evolve, with new technologies such as online marketplaces and
blockchain-based authentication systems once again changing the way art is
bought and sold. However, the fundamentals of the art market remain the same as
collectors and investors seek out works that they consider to be of cultural or
financial value.

American Diner Art Print by Mark Taylor

But where the art market has
changed most is that a majority of the art market for the majority of working
artists is no longer confined to any of the above, for many buyers today
outside of the galleries and major art fairs, it’s a purely decorative need that
drives the purchase. The significant change is in what and why people buy these
days, not necessarily just how or where they buy it.

That’s not to be disparaging
to most of the artwork that we’re more likely to come across in big box stores
or online, even galleries exist with the sole purpose of selling “art to the
masses” and it’s not to say that the art produced is produced with less talent
or skill than we witnessed from the Old Masters, but the art market today has
evolved to be more than the sum of its parts and there is no longer a single
art market (if there ever really was).

The art market of today is no
longer seen as a singular, it is many art markets that serve very different
needs and tastes but the principles of selling art are not fundamentally any
different today than they were back in the 1800s. Nodding back to even older
ways of selling art, there are now art markets that serve an even more
traditional method of trading works by utilising the good old fashioned barter
system and I really wouldn’t be surprised if we didn’t see more of this come
back. I’m always happy to consider a trade, so long as the trade is not the
promise of great exposure.

As I said earlier, for a lot
of people, it isn’t the transaction of an art sale that excites them, it is the
experience of an art sale that hooks them. It’s how we as artists deliver that
hook that turns non-typical art buyers into potential art collectors. So it’s
essential to understand how to provide that hook if you are an independent
visual artist running a small art business and it’s essential to the wider art
community that exists even within the major galleries. A new art buyer purchasing
a relatively inexpensive piece of decorative art today could easily develop
aspirations to visit a gallery and purchase a piece of high end fine art tomorrow.

As an artist, it can be
tempting to rely solely on online sales platforms such as Etsy, Amazon, social
media or even your own website to sell your work. After all, these platforms
offer a global reach, convenient payment processing, and a low barrier to
entry. As I have said many times on these pages, it’s far easier today to reach
a global audience than it is to reach a local one.

So while I sing the virtues of
doing things the old way I’m not suggesting that we step away completely from
our online world, not even just a bit. If the pandemic has taught us anything
it should be that we should have access to a number of baskets to place our
eggs in rather than just the one, and at least one of those baskets should nod
back to the time before digital took over the world.

Selling your work in person
allows you to connect with potential buyers on a more personal level and it
presents you with a unique gift that no online presence can truly provide, you
can occasionally create those deep connections that form between two humans
that can then turn casual buyers into life-long collectors. To do that, you
have to build a relationship with the buyer alongside a level of trust and
that’s a really hard thing to do really well online. Where it is done well,
there’s almost always a human doing something behind the scenes.

The downside with offline is
that I simply can’t automate some of the numbers I need to manage my output and
influence my thinking. When I place my work online I get analytics presented in
a neat little grid. I get to see a lot of numbers and pretty graphs, but they
give me no real sense of who the people who are visiting my site really are.

Now I’m sure if I had access to
the kind of analytics that the likes of Amazon use, I would be able to tell you
exactly when someone will make their next purchase, I could probably tell what
they’ll be thinking in five minutes time, but us regular folk don’t have access
to anything quite like that.

With the analytics that most
of us will have access to, I can’t tell you that person A is more responsive to
the texture of the artwork, I can probably make an informed guess that they
like the colour blue because they looked at more works in that colour, but looking
at online analytics, I’m missing critical information that makes it easy for me
to work out not just the kind of artwork they’re more likely to buy, but the
kind of artwork that I really should be more focussed on creating.

Most of us have some level of
access to online analytics platforms that do a very good job, but everything I
do after looking through the virtual numbers is only ever going to be reactive.
A thousand people might have viewed a particular artwork during the day but
there’s nothing that I can do in the moment to try and persuade the 990 people
who didn’t buy a print or an original to part with their money, I can’t be
proactive in the way that I can be face to face.

By participating in art shows,
gallery exhibitions, or even setting up a pop-up shop in a local market, you
have the opportunity to meet your audience face to face, hear their feedback,
and answer their questions about your work. This type of interaction builds
trust and can lead to long-term relationships with collectors who will continue
to support your art in the future.

Additionally, participating in
offline events and exhibitions can help you build your reputation as an artist.
By being present in the local arts community and participating in events, you
increase your visibility and the chances of being discovered by curators,
collectors, and other art professionals who can help take your career to the
next level.

90s Digital Camera Art Print by Mark Taylor

Another advantage of offline
sales is the potential for higher profit margins. While online sales platforms
offer convenience and a potentially large customer base, they often charge fees
for listing, processing payments, and shipping. We might balk at the thought of
being represented by a gallery who then take 50% of the sale, but some of these
online marketplaces are happiest when you’re only making ten percent of the
total sale and you’re doing all of the work when it comes to encouraging
customers to visit.

By selling your work in
person, you mostly eliminate these fees and can potentially make a higher
profit on each sale. You still have business costs, and there’s the matter of
your time, but adding people into the mix when few others are doing that, is
now seen as being something very different from what’s rapidly becoming the
norm.

It’s also worth bearing in
mind that when you market and sell your work offline, you choose the art you
are surrounded by. Online, that gift is not usually within your reach, your
closest competitor could set up shop right next door, or even on the same web
page, or even worse, you could be the only human in a page of bots.

These marketplaces have a
place, but they should be used as another outlet, a tool, rather than being set
up in the hope that they become a passive income generating gravy train, but so
many artists fall for the promise of automating an income, and from experience,
that rarely ever happens.

Relying on automation to fully
look after your business is also fundamentally deskilling you, and if you don’t
have the business skills already, they’ll hamper you when you eventually need
them. Participating in offline sales can help you hone your marketing and sales
skills but more than that, I’ve yet to come across any technology that can take
critical business decisions based on years of experience as a creator and that
all-important gut instinct.

If I take on a commission I
need to qualify the commissioner so I can feel confident about being paid, if I
left that to AI, right now, I don’t think it’s yet capable of instinctively
knowing when something is off. Artists have for a long time been targets for
scammers.

By interacting with customers
in person and observing their reactions to your work, you can gain valuable
insights into what resonates with your audience and how to communicate the
value of your work. This knowledge can then be applied to your online sales
strategy, making it more effective and efficient and that human response is
priceless, never underestimate just how much it tells you about you need to
know about what you need to include in your next creation.

Not to scare the horses here,
but the world of social media is changing and because social media is the
bedrock on online marketing, this becomes a worry on so many fronts. Forget the
cancel culture if you inadvertently offend a bot, that’s just one issue with
the potential to sink a business. The new worry for small businesses is that
these platforms are on the brink of massive change or collapse without some
serious financial injections that will replace the pots of gold they became accustomed
too when people were less concerned about privacy and the days when people
clicked on ads.

The Twitter platform under
Musk has realised what most of us on the outer fringes have realised for years,
running a social media platform is expensive and when regulation and
legislation prevent the tech giants from harvesting your data in the same way
that they were doing less than a decade ago, the monetisation of those
platforms has to come from somewhere else and the only other place they can
turn to, is either online ads or you.

Let’s face it, in some way we
have always funded social media and we have always paid a high price to use it.
We have handed over access to our lives in ways that often, even our family or
partners would be oblivious to. We shared our lives and innermost thoughts
voluntarily for years while knowing deep down it was a problem, and then it
became a problem in the open and we were all outraged that companies could take
our personal data and do a bunch of other stuff with it like sell it. It was
all too late, they already had it and then we began to find out what they
really did with it.

It was the sale and sharing of
this data that funded the access we had that meant we didn’t need to reach into
our pockets and pay to post with physical cash. Online Ad spend replaced the
data sales for a while, albeit that online ads were more than likely never
quite as fruitful as the data sales, and while it was a steady income it was
one that eventually wasn’t quite enough to continue paying the rent especially
when privacy restrictions started applying to online ads as well.

With an expensive platform
left to run and diminishing income, It would be a momentous task to then ask
the end user to start paying with money directly out of their pockets because
since the very start of social media, the tech giants have done nothing but
condition end users to expect the services for free, and somehow, now it’s our
problem.

Enter from stage right,
twitter blue. Musk’s latest attempt at monetising something that everyone had
been getting for free in an attempt to pay back the millions of dollars a day
that twitter was loosing. This was partly because twitter had found itself in a
place that needed to be fed with constant hires and increasingly more
infrastructure at a time during the pandemic when infrastructure was at a
premium.

As the bubble of Twitter began
to stretch beyond its income, something that was likely happening way before
the pandemic, it was inevitable that at some point it would begin to rip at the
seams. Once the reliance on Twitter and social media more widely went back
towards pre-pandemic levels, albeit lower levels because people were fed up
with the division and prejudice and all that other stuff, there was no longer a
need for the additional hires and the number of people jettisoning the platform
would put the need for the additional infrastructure into question.

Something had to change in its
delivery and Musk’s litmus test of moving the income generation towards end
users to fund the platform rather than advertisers essentially set out the stall
that this would be the end of free at the point of access social media for
everyone. You can bet that other platforms are watching closely and we are now
heading towards a social media landscape that could very well soon find itself
in a transition towards being entirely pay to play.

So I think it’s wise to start
thinking about some of these changes as artists and small business owners.
Social media will exponentially change over the coming years and with Facebook
now rolling out paid for verification, the transition has now officially started,
even if they’re not openly admitting it. Twitter have now announced that those
who don’t pay will have no reach, to be honest, I’m not sure how most of us
would tell the difference, so if Twitter was the litmus test, the question becomes,
does this change in direction mean that other social platforms including
Facebook will go the same way?

Industrial by Mark Taylor

If I was to go all out, and if
I was a betting man, and if I were to also look at the current business model
objectively, what social media needs right now is a good veterinarian to put it
out of its misery. That might sound cold and dramatic, but this is exactly what
would be needed if the same thing happened to any other business in any other
space.

Social media as we currently
know it certainly needs a reset and it really needs better PR people, not CTOs
and engineers being the public face. It also needs to start providing better
value to creators and the small businesses that have been propping it up with
ad-spend or attracting more viewers. Social media is so similar these days to
the wider media industry that it’s become more and more about getting eyes on
the content so that they can serve the ads, and it’s also become more about
dividing populations because division drives engagement.

Can anything save it, I’m
certainly not sure that monetisation by the end user can, we’re far too late
for that. I’m not convinced that the numbers will be there, especially in the
midst of a downward spiralling global economy that’s not just affecting
businesses but the people who buy from those businesses as well. We are already
saturated by subscriptions and I don’t think social media is a pick up and put
down option in the way services such as Netflix are.

Could innovation save social
media? A Metaverse has been done before with Second Life, the tundra of the
meta through the lens of Virtual Reality is currently as barren as a desert,
digital real estate hasn’t had its foundations laid even if companies have already
invested heavily in the pixelated ground, add to that, the messaging isn’t
clear about what it is, and ultimately, the technology just isn’t there at the
point of need which is exactly right now.

Where the tech is available
it’s not overly affordable for everyone, and these are barriers that need to be
removed. It’s not so much everything everywhere, all at once, it’s more akin to
everything nowhere, far too late.

I realise that this might
sound as if I’m not just attending the funeral of social media but I’m
celebrating and  eating canapes at its
wake. I think that’s inevitable, in time we will all be attending the wake and
providing a post mortem style commentary on what went wrong. Social media will
either change beyond recognition or it will eventually fail. It will become
smaller, it might even become more focussed, both of which will be good but I
think we can see where it’s heading and eventually, sometime possibly sooner
than we think, we will have to pay to play and I’m not as yet convinced the
numbers will be there to make it worth it.

As artists, I think it might
be wise to make sure any plan you have for the future absolutely includes
having an offline strategy. It’s going to be critical that it still includes
online components, but neither should be completely symbiotic with each other. If
businesses are going to find the pay to play landscape a challenge that’s a
good indication that regular end users will too. If the buyers get priced out
of using it then we’re kind of back to where we were before digital.

In some form, I think most of these
services will continue, I also think some will come to a painful end, but as
artists, if we are to make the investment in them, be that in time or money, we
really will need to know that our audience of buyers will be sticking around.

Fly me to the Moon by Mark Taylor

It’s probably worth quickly
picking up on this point too, especially as supermarket loyalty schemes draw
many parallels with the primary purpose of social media, at least for the
companies that operate these platforms and schemes.

Supermarket loyalty schemes
have been around for several decades, and they operate on a simple principle:
customers earn points or rewards for their purchases, which can be redeemed for
discounts or free products. In exchange, supermarkets collect valuable data on
their customers’ shopping habits, such as what products they buy, how often
they buy them, and how much they spend.

This data allows supermarkets
to better understand their customers’ needs and preferences, and to tailor
their marketing and promotional efforts accordingly and they’re better placed
to make this work, you can’t easily dismiss a pop-up ad when it’s on display in
front of the humous for the three-percenters to buy in a supermarket.

The value to businesses and
marketers lies in the wealth of data that they collect from users. The purpose
of both loyalty schemes and social media is to collect data on consumer
behaviour and preferences, but the limiting factor of any of these schemes is
that they can only observe behaviour that happens within the schemes reach and
sight. When Apple made privacy changes, and additional data protection laws
became better enforced, the value for retailers and social media companies
began to ebb away.

These schemes alongside the
data collection methods used in social media are also painfully expensive to
manage, particularly now the public are more sighted on the real purpose of how
their data is often used, as a result, people are more reluctant than ever
before to share their details and they’re much less inclined to share their
email address. Two big issues spring to mind here.

One of the most significant
parallels between social media and supermarket loyalty schemes is the potential
for data misuse. In recent years, there have been several high-profile data
breaches involving social media platforms which have resulted in the exposure
of users’ personal information. Similarly, there have been instances of
supermarkets selling or sharing customer data with third-party marketers,
without customers’ knowledge or consent.

Another parallel is the ethics
of data collection. While both social media and supermarket loyalty schemes
offer users the ability to opt-out of data collection, many users are not aware
of the extent of data collection or the implications of sharing their personal
information. This raises questions about transparency and informed consent, and
whether users are being fully informed about the ways in which their data is
being used.

These schemes are so
inherently similar to social media that they’re almost an exact fit inside the
same bubbles that have been bursting so rapidly in the tech industry
recently.  There comes a point where you
have learned everything you need to learn, and it’s at this point when running
those schemes becomes yet another expense that eats up profit, and there also
comes a point when the data stops flowing because people now realise they have
a choice.

What we can expect to see with
these schemes in the future, if they indeed do continue in a similar way, is
that the supermarkets will look towards monetisation. You’ll subscribe to a
discount club, in the UK we’re already seeing this with one of the biggest
supermarkets, Tesco, with its Tesco Plus program, you will get benefits, maybe
slightly lower prices, but what’s the real cost?

I think the point here is that
the digital landscape will change for small businesses. I know a lot of my
buyers have already moved off social platforms completely having become tired
of the division and politicisation of almost every post that appears in a
timeline. The only respite seems to be from the small businesses who are doing
their best to continue to have a presence for their customers who remain online
on these platforms, but even small business posts often have their comments
hijacked by some numpty with an opinion about something totally irrelevant to
the post.

Waiting in the Sky by Mark Taylor

There’s no real secret to this
other than we need to strip things right back to basics and follow the
principles of good old customer service and go back to treating buyers like the
superstars they are. I have so many conversations with new artists who have
pursued the online only route of sales and mostly those conversations are around
how to increase an artists online exposure. Often there’s an expectation that
the answer is you have to do something online to increase online exposure but
that’s the lowest price of entry, you need to be just as, if not even more
focussed on developing a profile and a presence offline in parallel.

Increasing your visibility
starts offline by engaging with the art community, attending physical events,
and building offline engagement by communicating face to face. I’ve never been
convinced that doing everything online is a good strategy in the art world.
Today I spend more time having offline dialogue with buyers and potential
buyers than I do creating social media posts. It’s not that running an online
campaign is futile, it’s essential for now, but it’s more essential to be where
your potential buyers are and they’re not always engaged with social media.

We can’t assume that people
will just find us, the online art space is crowded, almost saturated, so unless
you are doing something that really stands head and shoulders above anything
anyone else is doing to promote themselves and their work, I don’t think we can
make the assumption that potential buyers will be purposely seeking us or our
work out online because it’s like finding a needle in a haystack.  

When it comes to selling art I
believe from experience that it’s way easier to sell art face to face than it
is online. That could be due to human nature, it’s way more difficult to say no
to a human than it is to say no to a screen. When I do go online, I’m not
necessarily going to social channels as a first port of call, for my retro
works I engage with potential clients through services such as Discord and
Reddit where I can find a community where the discussion is more focussed on my
subject area, or I turn up at physical events.

Never think of online purely
as the typical social media platforms, if you paint niche subjects it’s more likely
that your audience is going to be hanging around in the community areas of
specialist websites, or they’re hanging around on Discord or on Reddit. People
are looking towards alternatives to the traditional platforms and where those
alternatives don’t exist, people are looking offline. I’m very much a believer
that if you want to engage with a community, you have to be part of that
community.

Ready, Steady, Pause by Mark Taylor

If you are dealing with
people, and that might be a strange concept post-pandemic, humans, mostly just
like us, tend to favour buying from people who are upfront and honest and that
includes being open and honest about your pricing. If you sell a ten dollar
print, few people will question your pricing strategy, but if you are selling a
piece of work that would be a considered purchase for the buyer, they will often
want more information and you could find yourself in a place where you have to
justify the price you have arrived at.

It’s a nuance of the art
world, we rarely question how the price of a widget is decided, every time I
visit the supermarket lately I question why my favourite Cheddar cheese has
almost doubled in price over the past year, yet I still begrudgingly pop it in
the basket and then hope that there’s not too much month left at the end of the
money when I get to the checkout. I’m upset, even angry about the increased
cost, but I don’t then question it when I have to pay.

With art, the artist almost
always has to justify the price they charge. If you can do this, buyers will be
appreciative and will rarely show resentment and most people really do
understand the increasing costs that small businesses face.

They also understand that you
get better at doing what you do and that you have to place an insane amount of
effort into keeping your skills up to date, they also understand when your work
becomes more in demand, but you have to be able to explain it so that they
understand that you’re not simply nickel and diming them.

What buyers don’t really like
is when pricing is obscured or ambiguous. I have seen this so many times
recently where the price of a work is indicated but then other charges are then
added on top at the last minute. If a buyer thinks a work is going to cost them
a hundred dollars but they then find that there are additional charges for
taxes and shipping making it close to two hundred dollars when they go to the
checkout, in a world where everyone has become what I call, “Prime Trained”,
they tend to turn up their noses at the last minute and you end up losing a
sale.

Prime trained, for those who
aren’t, is the concept of buying a product with free, expedited delivery,
inclusive of taxes, and presented as a single cost. Even then it might not be
clear, shipping is generally free for Amazon Prime members, but the cost of
shipping is part of the price you pay to be a Prime member but when we see free
shipping, it’s one less thing to worry about and it takes another barrier away
for the buyer.

One Careful Owner by Mark Taylor

Whenever I sell anything
online buyers have 30-days to change their mind. If it’s a stock item such as a
print and they buy it directly, I offer the same guarantee when I’m dealing
with them face to face. If they want to change it for something they like
better, that’s no problem either. The only exception to this is when they have
ordered a bespoke commission, but even then, if a buyer is unsure whether a
work will match their décor then I’m more than happy to let them hang a
similarly sized print on their wall for a week or make an agreed number of
changes to the commission.

The secret to offering this
kind of guarantee isn’t in financing their poor decorative choices where the piece
in question would be absolutely out of place in the buyers surroundings, but to
ensure that the customer is buying what will work for them from the outset.

This means working with them
to find the perfect piece that they want to live with, doing something as
simple as demonstrating how they can use the augmented reality feature on the
Pixels app to virtually view the work on their wall whether they purchase the
work from Pixels or not, but more critically, taking some time to converse with
them to figure out what their needs really are. Those are all effective things
that should be done as part of what should be an ongoing dialogue during the
process of selling a piece of work to make sure the buyer remains happy.

You don’t have to offer money
back guarantees, that’s a difficult thing to do as an independent artist
running a small business when you have to spend so many hours and make so much
financial investment to create a piece of work. You have material costs,
sometimes you need to add licencing costs, shipping, and other business costs,
and the time you invest, so the stakes can be high even for straightforward
works where no client revisions are needed.

It is different online where
we don’t necessarily run point on or carry the burden of the transaction, and
it’s different when it’s an open edition print that can be returned to stock, but
there are ways in which you can offer buyers some peace of mind. If you have prints
in stock then it’s easy enough to offer to swap out work for a piece that will
work better in the space that they have.

Your mission is to make sure
the buyer is happy because that’s the kind of juju that brings in more buyers.
I’m sure there was once a piece of research that found that buyers who were
happy with the product and the service were more likely to turn into repeat
buyers, and a few would even let their friends know too.

In many cases, art purchases
are going to be significant financial outlays for buyers and they’re buying
something that they will have to live with for a while. It still gives me
chills after all these years when I think about that, knowing that a piece of
work I created is hanging on someone’s wall, so I will always do whatever needs
to be done to make sure they never have to live with something they resent.

Just not the sugar free
edition which is a direct replacement for a weapon of mass destruction
involving frequent visits to the bathroom. It’s well documented that over
consumption of sugar free gummy bears is bad for the gut and even worse for the
bowel, but regular gummy bears, they’re a diplomatic tool for good. I digress,
but we often talk about the value add, and I think that mostly it’s something
that we overthink.

A value add might come from
the after sales service that you provide, or it might come from the materials
you use, it could even be a low cost upgrade to a premium paper or canvas
stock, often there’s very little difference between budget and not quite so
budget supports. Or, it could just be adding a nice touch to the packaging when
you send the goods out. So many Etsy sellers have jumped on the Haribo
bandwagon recently, every time I make a new purchase from a different Etsy
seller I always seem to end up with a free mini-bag of Haribo’s in the
packaging. It’s a nice touch.

Discounting work is never a
great idea but if you have collectors who regularly make a purchase there are
things you can do to provide extra value that doesn’t devalue the work. There’s
usually more room for flexibility with framing costs, or you can offer upgraded
mats, a hanging kit, or if the buyers local, you can deliver and hang it for
them. Never think of discounts being the only value you can add, there are
plenty of creative ways to add value without it massively impacting the bottom
line.

Video 2000 by Mark Taylor

Offering good service is
something that in time will be possible to offer using automation and AI. There
are enough examples in the tech and service sector already where technology is
as seamless as a human in delivering results, but these examples wouldn’t
easily translate to the business of selling art, at least just yet.

As I said earlier, we’re
selling an experience, something that is subjective, something that triggers an
emotional response, and that’s a very different concept to selling a generic
widget or an online service.

There’s a huge difference
between good service and great service. To offer great service, well, I can’t
think of any level of automation that provides that and I’m not convinced it ever
will. Mostly, automation defaults to the minimum viable product. Automation
just has to do a single job with no expectations that it will deliver any level
of value over and above, it’s purpose it to achieve one single outcome for
which it is tasked which might be to renew a subscription, raise a service
ticket on a support desk, or any number of simple, usually single things that
humans no longer have to do.

With humans, we kind if like
it when they go over and above, and we like it even more when they make us feel
special. Automation can’t do that without coming across as weird, have you ever
had a chatbot give you a compliment that’s genuinely sincere? I think even with
the progress being made in the world of AI, we’re still a very long way off it
coming across as being authentically, authentic. AI is programmed to mimic
being authentic, humans have authenticity built in, well most of them do.

Midnight Pass by Mark Taylor

AI and automation is clearly
the future but my gut instincts and experience in the field tell me that it’s
still a future that’s a way off despite the massive advances and the great AI race
that’s taking place right now.

Before we get there, there
will need to be more in the way of safeguarding that will be needed, maybe the
blunt instrument of government regulation will eventually need to happen and
there will certainly need to be oversight at some level to limit the
opportunity to completely weaponise it. The problem is that AI is already being
weaponised even in its current form and the recent calls for a six-month hiatus
in machine learning models is a response that is a lot too late.

AI and automation might work
really well for some businesses but I’m not convinced it will work completely
autonomously in the process of selling art for a very long time. It can assist
the process but the uniqueness and subjectivity of buying art isn’t something
that is prescriptive.

As I said earlier, we can’t
avoid any level of automation in our businesses, and I don’t think we should
even try to avoid automation if it gives us more time to spend either working
with a client or on a clients ask. But right now, the important thing is to
make sure that we are looking after the buyers we already have, we need to make
sure that we don’t alienate the buyers who simply refuse to engage online, but
the important thing is that we remain responsive to our markets wherever they
might hang out.

The lowest price of admission
to becoming a professional artist is to make sure that you do have a web
presence, a website that isn’t going away anytime soon, unlike the risk that
plagues social media. It’s also important to have a social media presence, you
need to be where your audience are.

But we don’t then have to
follow trends, mistakenly thinking that we absolutely have to become
increasingly digital, or automated, or appear to be uber cool. Art isn’t that
kind of business, and I’m sure there are plenty of artists out there who are
fans of automating much of what they do, but for the majority of working
artists that’s just not where their audience will be at. Go ahead and ask them
and you might be surprised at their response.

There’s one more thing to
consider too. As artists, we’re here for a limited time and hopefully our art
will be here for longer, but during this limited time we each have a
responsibility to make sure that the arts never get completely consumed into
what is often only a temporary world and for that, there will be many buyers
who will thank you for not trying to automate the creation of future art
history.

Until next time, I hope you have some creative fun and continue pushing forward with your art, you’ve got this!

Mark x

About Mark…

Mark is an artist who
specialises in vintage inspired works featuring technology and random stuff
from the 70s, 80s and 90s. He is also known for his landscape works and the
occasional abstract.