It’s the end of the educational year and students are leaving school for the summer. Some of the lucky/unlucky students (depending on how you see it) are leaving three years study at University to enter the big wide world of work. University Graduates means University Graduations and there are many of them each year throughout the UK. Last week our local University, The University of Northampton was holding it’s Graduations.
USB Memory Sticks Used at Graduations
The graduation process is a good celebratory end to a three or four year course of study. It can be however, quite expensive. Behind the ceremony and the awards, graduations can cost a lot of money for the students on top of three years of accommodation and living costs. Graduates need to pay for gowns and these have to be bought with a specific company so the cost is dictated and there is no shopping around for price.
Photos are another cost for those graduating. Everyone knows that the graduation is about the photo taken holding the scroll and wearing the gowns. Like the gowns, the photos can only be ordered through one company and they have an interesting price structure.
The photography company for the graduation sold the photos in packs. The prices of the packs were a bit of a surprise because they were quite complicated. There were packs with different sized images, packs with frames, packs with single photos, packs with family and single photos etc. The only constant was that as the amount of photos and photo sizes went up so did the price of the pack. There was one thing about their pricing that was easy to understand and made a lot of sense, for an additional cost you could have all of the photos that they took saved onto one USB flash drive or CD.
Along with CD’s the photography company was using branded USB flash drives to save the images and sell to graduates. We are selling more and more branded flash drives to photographers as they move from CDs to USB memory sticks. We are slightly biased but there are many reasons why USB flash drives are better than CDs. For example, the device is more impressive, transfer speeds are much quicker, the branding is much more impressive and one of the biggest differences – the memory stick is re-usable.
Customers are more than likely going to copy the photos from the stick onto their computer and keep the flash drive for personal use, something which cannot happen with a CD. The USB flash drive then acts as a marketing aid and a continual reminder of the photography company.
So for those companies and especially photographers out there wondering whether they should change from CDs to branded USB memory sticks we hope that you make the right decision and embrace the change.
