Digital Asset Management Blog – DAM is Not a Commodity – Part 1.
In 2010, more than any other year, we’ve had marketers and representatives of marketers (agencies, IT, etc.) come to us for more information about our DAM SaaS solutions and one of the first questions that is asked is often“How much does it cost?”.
Now I don’t want to discourage you to contact us and I don’t blame you that “price” is top-of-mind. You have a budget just as I do.
However, as a DAM vendor, we’re frequently fielding questions about price before determining if we can help an organization solve their problems and meet their needs with digital asset management. Maybe you ask about price first because you don’t know what other questions to ask… we’ll get into that later. But, if you don’t know what your needs are, you’re going to end up with someone else telling you what your needs are.
Let me tell you thatDigital Asset Management is not a commodity. Let’s first look at what makes a commodity a commodity.
Question: What Is a Commodity? (From Mike Moffatt, former About.com Guide, #1 Google result for “What is a commodity?“)
Answer: When an economist, economics professor, or economics textbook talks about a commodity, they mean a good that possesses the following properties:
- Usually produced and/or sold by many different companies
- Is uniform in quality between companies that produce/sell it. You cannot tell the difference between one firm’s product and another.
And, as you’ll see in theWikipedia entry for “Commodity” … Commoditization occurs as a goods or services market loses differentiation across its supply base, often by the diffusion of the intellectual capital necessary to acquire or produce it efficiently.
Sure, there’s parts of DAM found in some technologies for image libraries and web galleries that are said to have “commoditized DAM” for these key scenarios with marketing work groups. The experts will tell you that the main difference between those technologies and true DAM isscalability, in addition to other vendor intangibles to consider—service, support, roadmap, integration and stability.
Why DAM is not a commodity
DAM is Not a Commodity -Part 2:http://blog.widen.com/blog/digital-asset-management-blog/0/0/dam-is-not-a-commodity-part-2