What if a good supplier helped customers buy less?

By Natasha Fyfe, Founder and Managing Director of Mobad

Customers often ask us for our best price - I have always thought they should be asking for our best value.

Those two things are not the same, particularly in the sign and graphics industry. Two products can look almost identical on the day they are supplied. One may still be doing its job years later, the other may fade, peel or fail within months.

The cheaper product only remains cheaper if it works for as long as the customer needs it to.

This is what we mean at Mobad when we say durable is sustainable. If something remains useful for longer, it does not need to be manufactured, packed, transported and fitted again before it should.

But I think there is a bigger question here. What if the job of a good supplier is not to keep selling customers more, but to help them need less?

Doing the job properly should mean doing it fewer times

I have always worked this way. It was not invented as a sustainability policy or marketing strategy for Mobad. It is how I expect to be treated by the people and businesses I buy from and I could not sleep at night knowing we had supplied something that was not going to work properly.

It would be easy for us not to laminate a sticker, or to charge for one material and quietly substitute a cheaper one. On the day it was delivered, the customer would not know. We could pocket the difference, and by the time the product started fading, peeling or shrinking, the invoice would have been paid long ago.

I know this still happens. Customers should not have to become sign-industry experts to know whether they have received what they paid for.

Commercially, repeat orders might appear attractive. But doing the job properly should mean doing it fewer times, not creating a reason for the customer to keep coming back because the previous product did not last for its intended lifespan.

A good supplier should question the request

Sometimes the right answer costs more initially because it will last considerably longer. At other times, questioning the request produces a simpler and less expensive solution.

A customer recently requested an operational board involving drilled plaques, hanging points and somewhere to store the pieces not in use. Once we understood the purpose, we suggested a magnetic board with magnetic markers instead. It was neater, easier to use and far less complicated.

Our work for Olleco is the durability version of the same principle. They wanted a label capable of surviving around six washes; we kept testing until we developed one that survived more than 40. The result is that they should need to buy fewer replacements from us. The technical story is covered in our Olleco case study.

That may sound like an odd commercial decision but I think it is the right one.

Are we measuring the wrong thing?

Businesses need to make a profit. Mobad does too. For us, profit means paying our staff well, reinvesting in the company, maintaining modern equipment and continuing to improve how efficiently we work.

What I question is the assumption that a successful business must always persuade people to consume more, or that selling an ever-increasing number of items is automatically a positive result. We make physical products that use materials, energy, packaging and transport. That gives us a responsibility to consider whether each product is really needed, how long it will remain useful and, increasingly, what will happen to it at the end of its life.

The way work is sourced can make this difficult. Price matters, especially for organisations working within strict annual budgets. In local-authority tenders, it is not unusual to see cost weighted at 60 or 70 per cent of the evaluation. I understand the pressure to demonstrate value for public money, but such a heavy emphasis on the initial price does not tell the whole story, particularly when countless material and production combinations can meet the same brief - all with vastly different outcomes.

It can reward a product that looks acceptable on delivery and fails after twelve months over one that costs more initially but remains effective for years.

We talk about built-in obsolescence in many industries. I am not suggesting that premature failure in ours is always deliberate. Sometimes it comes from price pressure, an incomplete specification or nobody asking enough questions about how the product will be used. But the effect can be much the same: an item is made in a way that almost guarantees it will need replacing sooner than it should. That is the opposite of 'durable is sustainable'.

If nobody checks the product again after one, two or three years, how do we know which supplier actually offered the best value?

Perhaps suppliers should not be measured only by how quickly and cheaply they fulfil orders. Perhaps they should also be recognised for the purchases, replacements and waste they help customers avoid.

Give good suppliers permission to challenge you - that requires a different relationship between customers and suppliers.

Tell your supplier the outcome you need, not only the product you think you want. Explain where it will be used, what it will face and how long it needs to last. Give good suppliers enough information, and permission to challenge the original brief.

We also have to be honest: the sign and graphics industry is not inherently sustainable - that is a whole other article, and one I intend to write! We make physical products that can be difficult to recycle, and we want to become more responsible for what happens to them at the end of their lives.

That responsibility starts before manufacture. If a message is needed for only six months, we should not just ask whether its physical form needs to last ten years. We should ask whether another physical product is needed at all. Could an existing sign be adapted, or could time-sensitive information be communicated by website, email or text? Physical communication will sometimes be right, but it should not be automatic.

So instead of asking only, “What is your cheapest price?”, perhaps customers could also ask:

- What will give us the best value over the life of the product?

- Does this need to be a new physical product at all?

- Could we avoid, simplify, reuse or adapt anything?

- How long should this last in the real conditions it will face?

- What is likely to happen to it when it is no longer needed?

Where a physical product is the right answer, it will not always need to be the most durable or expensive option. Best value means making what is appropriate, making it properly and keeping it useful for as long as it needs to be useful.

I would rather build Mobad on trust than sell customers products I know they will soon need to replace.

What if a good supplier helped customers buy less?

I think perhaps they should.