Intro: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Posers podcast, the place where we skip the fluff. Say the quiet parts out loud and dig into what really matters. This is where photography, psychology, and business collide. I'm Jody, your host, and I'm bringing you my raw takes, hard wins, and a whole lot of unfiltered honesty about what it takes to build a photography business that actually connects and makes money.
So ladies, grab your headphones and get your tits up and your ears open because we are going to build something really incredible together.
Hello, hello, hello, and welcome back to another episode of the Posers Podcast, my beautiful, beautiful posers. Okay, I'm gonna be really clear. I'm gonna be really honest. Sometimes the podcast mind fucks me, And I say this in the way that, I mean, I love this podcast so freaking much, and I really work hard [00:01:00] to.
Create really valuable content for this podcast sometimes. So much so that it paralyzes me a little bit. I think that the things that are rolling through my head, I'm like, oh yeah, I wanna talk about that, but I need to have all of this research and all of this buildup, and I need to have all of this stuff written down and even saying this I'm like, Jody, what in the mind?
Block is this because hearing myself say it, it feels a little bit like a self-worth kind of issue. And maybe I need to tackle that with my therapist a little bit. Like if I don't show up, if I don't bring enough value, if I don't, you know, do all of this work to prepare for the podcast, then what will people think of me, right?
So I'm doing something a little bit unhinged. With this episode, and that's because most of the time these [00:02:00] thoughts pop into my head while I'm driving that I think, oh, that's a good podcast episode. Oh, I should talk about that on the podcast. But because I'm driving, I don't write down a note. 'cause I mean safety first, right?
But I don't write down a note. Or by the time I get to my location, I forget to write it down. And then by the time that I'm coming back to record the podcast, I'm like, oh, what was that thing? Oh, what was that thing that I was thinking about? So I have decided that if I have the time and if I'm capable of doing so, which is exactly what's happening right now, then I'm just gonna pull over.
I'm just gonna record the thing that I'm thinking about in my head, and maybe I'm just going to become this lady who literally is just known for a side of the road podcast. I don't know. Okay. I also have to warn you a little bit because I hear myself sort of swallowing a cough. [00:03:00] I've been sick since Turks and Caicos.
I have had a cough and. I thought that it was very allergy related, and then while I was in Turton Caicos, I was like, oh man, I actually feel kind of sick. And then coming back I was like, no, it's allergy season. It's only coughing because there's all this itch going on, but I think I might need to actually go to a doctor because I can.
Take a deep breath without needing to cough, and I can't really talk without needing to cough, and it's become so bad that I'm worried that it's like a bronchitis or something like that. So if my voice feels a little bit funky, then that is the reason why, and I will try to get through this without hacking into your speakers.
Okay, so I am geeking out. Right now a little bit about, this is why I pulled over. this is the thing that I've been thinking about for a couple of days now, and I'm just like, you know what? I've gotta pull over, I've gotta get this [00:04:00] outta my head. I've got to talk about this because you know that I geek out over buying psychology, but I geek out at an even higher level about luxury buying psychology, and I was having this conversation.
With some other high-earning photographers the other day, and it sent me down a rabbit hole to find the research and the explanation for what we were talking about. And that rabbit hole led me to an author named Jean Noel Cap Re Cap Ferre. That's right. It's K-A-P-F-E-R-E-R, but it's actually pronounced CAP for rare because I think that it's French.
But if you don't know who he is, which I did not know who he is, but he is one of the most respected luxury brand strategists [00:05:00] in the world. He literally advises brands like Hermes, Louis Vuitton, Cartier. He advises them. On how to protect their positioning, and I just ordered his book and I'm freaking out and I want it to get here.
I am salivating to get my hands on this book, so yes, I probably could have just ordered the audio book, but I've learned that I cannot do business books on audio. Because, well, for one, whenever I'm reading a business book, I'm writing notes all over the pages and I need to read and reread things. I need to highlight things.
I need to do all this stuff. But the number one reason why I don't do a business book as an audio book is because I get bored to fucking death trying to listen to a man teach me. And it has less to do with it being a man and more to do with just their voices are so slow and so boring. [00:06:00] We need to start a movement to get Morgan Friedman or Meryl Streep or someone to perform these audio books for us so that we can actually listen to them on audio and be entertained at the same time.
That is a business idea I am willing to invest in. All right, so anyways. I was looking into Cap Ferre and chat told me that he talks about this one thing in his book, which is really the thing that grabbed my attention and the reason why I am so stoked to get my hands on this book because he says something that I think every photographer needs to hear because luxury is.
Such a buzzword that it's tossed around in our industry so easily. Okay. Everyone wants to slap the label of luxury onto their work. Kind of the same thing as fine art, [00:07:00] right? We think that if something has some Boca and Filmy look to it, then we call it luxury. But luxury isn't a look. Luxury is a whole entire mood.
So here's what Kare says. He says, and this one thing. It literally has my brain like titillating. On this one sentence, he says that luxury is built into the mind of your customer before it is built into your revenue. Meaning that people decide that something is luxury. Before they ever buy it.
You're like, okay, Jody, that seems completely like common sense. Why is this blowing you away? Obviously, we're gonna know that A YSL bag is luxury before we buy it, right? But this is the key point and how a lot of photographers have it backwards. It's not a situation where they [00:08:00] see your prices or they see your work and decide that you're luxury.
It's that they will only pay your prices if you've convinced their brain that your luxury first. Okay, so let me explain this a little tiny bit. So if you were to walk into Walmart and see the exact same YSL bag on the shelf in Walmart, you might like the bag. But you're not gonna place any value on it because it's on the shelf in Walmart and you might not even buy the bag because it's on the shelf in Walmart.
Okay? So we don't walk into YSL thinking, okay, I am going to just see a bag and just decide whether I like it and buy it. We're walking into YSL, knowing already that it's a luxury brand because of [00:09:00] what YSL has done to our brains before we ever walk in there. Same thing with Walmart. Before we ever walk into Walmart, our brains already know what we can expect about the experience and the pricing.
So that's the difference. That's the key difference. That photographers think that people need to see their photos and know that then those photos are expensive, but that's not actually the case, and this is the exact reason why you could. Get inside of some really crazy Facebook groups, which I am in a lot of these Facebook groups.
They're not really crazy. I'm just saying that some of the conversations that happen, they might be a little bit crazy, but especially inside of IPS Facebook groups, and you will see somebody [00:10:00] post images and think, oh, that's not my style. I'm gonna call a spade a spade. We're gonna look at it and we're gonna be, that's not good work.
Okay? But then you read the caption and this person is saying, oh, this is a $10,000 sale for me. This is a $20,000 sale for me. And our brains as artists are going, we, we, we, what? What do you mean? But that's exactly what I'm talking about. it's not the work that gets the luxury pricing. It is the perception that has to happen first in order to get that price tag.
Your photos aren't the thing that convinces them of the luxury price tag is what I'm saying. So then that means. the only difference between a photographer charging $1,400 and a photographer charging $4,000 [00:11:00] is how the business is perceived, not the images, the product or the images could literally be exactly the same in caliber or artistry or mastery or any of those things.
or actually the cheaper photographer's work could actually technically be more sound, but it wouldn't matter because what we're selling is not necessarily the artwork, but it's the difference in perception of the artwork. Now, this isn't motivational stuff. This isn't. Mindset bullshit.
Okay. There are entire academic studies around this. One of the most famous is called the Price Perception Study, and researchers gave people the exact same wine twice, same bottle, same poor, same everything. But they told the participants [00:12:00] that one glass costs $10 and the other costs $90. And then what happened was obviously participants rated the expensive wine as being significantly better.
But I mean, that's not a surprise. But here's the crazy part. Their brain scans actually showed more pleasure centers activating when they believed that the wine was expensive. Same wine, different perception. That is luxury psychology. Their brains actually activated real chemicals being triggered inside of their brains.
That's science. That's not fluff. That's not mindset. That's actual literal science. That's when we know that we're not studying marketing as a concept anymore, and we're studying the psychology that actually controls the marketing. And [00:13:00] that's when I start to get really turned on. Okay. That's when my nipples get really hard and I'm like, woo, that is powerful.
That is something that I'm like, how do we take that and put it into our business? Because we see this play out constantly in our industry. Take photographers like Sue Rice or. Lindsay Adler or Dawn Winters or Annie Lebowitz. Okay. These photographers go look at their Instagrams. These photographers don't constantly remind the world that they're available.
They don't say, Hey guys, my calendar is open. They don't say, I have a few spots left this month. They don't say that their mini shoots are happening. They show up like people whose time is already in demand, and that changes. How the market perceives them. [00:14:00] Kat Ferre actually talks about this exact concept.
He calls it anti laws of marketing. I can't, oh my God, I cannot wait to get my hands on this book. Luxury brands intentionally break the rules of traditional marketing. For example, traditional marketing says something like make your product accessible. And luxury marketing says restrict access.
Traditional marketing would say that you need to communicate the value, but luxury marketing says they should assume the value. And traditional marketing says that you need to chase your customer, but luxury marketing says that you need to let the customer chase you. If you think about the photographers who command the highest prices in the world, they follow these anti laws almost instinctively.
They understand that availability destroys [00:15:00] desirability. I wanna say that again. They understand that availability actually destroys desirability. There's actually famous case studies about this too, and they found that products perceived as scarce are automatically interpreted by consumers as higher quality.
Scarcity literally changes how our brain categorizes something, and this makes me super freaking giddy because it continues to justify my launch system. What I started to build back in 2018. So think about it after you've heard all of this that I've just started to talk about, and knowing that I run a limited seasonal portrait release or like a portrait drop, and you know that my sessions sell out in hours.
Now we know why. It's not because my photos are [00:16:00] necessarily better than any other photographer in town. It's because the system creates perceived rarity. Once you see this, you start noticing it everywhere. You'll see photographers posting my booking calendar is now open, and then they're shocked whenever nothing happens.
But what the audience actually hears is, oh, she has plenty of availability, which subconsciously tells the brain this isn't scarce. And if something isn't scarce. Our brains tell us it isn't valuable. So whenever you switch to a launch system, you're not trying to convince people to buy. You're letting perception do the work before the sale ever happens.
And this is the system that I started building when my husband left and I suddenly had to figure out how to build a business that could support these three growing boys of mine. Back then, I could [00:17:00] not rely. On a slow trickle of bookings, I needed momentum. So I stopped treating my calendar like it was a restaurant that was open every day and I started treating it a seasonal release like the luxury brands do.
So back then, I wasn't even running a portrait business yet. I was a wedding photographer, but I would do fall family photo shoots, obviously. And when I started figuring out the details of this system. I would launch my fall calendar, and I thought I was really freaking cool because I was booking 30 all inclusive shoots at about a thousand bucks each, so I'd make $30,000 in one day.
But obviously after switching to IPS and maintaining all of my same clientele because of that foundation that I had already psychologically laid, I now may quadruple that number on 30 shoots. But. You know that every time I release something, it sells because I control the perceived rarity. So much [00:18:00] so that even when people slide into my dms to ask to book a session, they usually start off with like, oh, I know you're always crazy booked, but do you think you can slide me in?
Some sort of variation of that comes into my dms almost daily, not because I'm shouting louder. But because the perception was built and maintained for almost a decade now, and that's exactly what cap first means whenever he says that luxury exists in your client's mind first, which is why the work we do inside of my Mastermind isn't just about marketing tactics.
It's about understanding how perception is engineered in the brain. First, because once you understand that you stop trying to compete on price, and you start building a brand that controls demand and actually drives revenue. Okay, so on March 31st, I said the wrong date on [00:19:00] last week's episode, March 31st Tuesday, I'm going to dive into so much more of what needs to happen in our businesses that nobody is even talking about right now.
It's not even something that I've covered in the Mastermind. So you're going to want to be signed up for that wait list. It'll be March 31st at 9:00 AM my time. So I'm on Pacific Time. So 12:00 PM Eastern, 9:00 AM Pacific. So mark your calendars and drop into the show notes or the newsletter to make sure that you're on that wait list.
Okay. I am hopping off of my Unhinged car rant. That's all I've got for you today. Bye for now, friends.
Outro: Okay, so that is a wrap on this episode of the Posers Podcast. If you loved it, please subscribe, rate, and review because honestly, algorithms are needier than all of our ex-boyfriends combined. And ladies, I need all the help I can get. If you've got thoughts, questions, love letters, even hate mail, please send them my way.
I [00:20:00] actually read every single one of them. So until next time, stapled, stay messy and don't let the bullshit win. Tits up. Ears open and go build something. Incredible. Bye for now, friends.
