The Missing Link Between Artist Brand and Art Pricing
When brand and pricing are developed separately, both suffer. Here’s why you should build them together.
I have to set the record straight. I’ve given conflicting advice on branding and pricing.
On day 1 of my entrepreneurship course, where students build a real business in 10 weeks, we start with brand.
They define their personal mission, their brand promise, and begin exploring business ideas they care about. Some of my students want to sell their art. Others want to solve a problem they see in the world like a lack of representation in film or mental health struggles among artists who are also student athletes. Most don’t yet know exactly what they’ll sell, and that’s intentional. We figure that out together through research and conversations with potential customers.
Then, during week 7 once their offering is defined, we talk about pricing. I introduce a value-based pricing framework that analyzes their offering, comparing it to alternatives in an algorithmic way to arrive at a price range.
Sounds pretty typical, right?
Well, week 7 is next week and I think I need to make a change.
I’ve realized that brand and pricing can’t be taught separately.
Not if my students want to maximize both. Here’s why.
How Brand Turns Into Economic Value
You probably already know that branding has little to do with colors, logos, and fonts.
Your personal brand as a creative is a representation of the experience you create for buyers. This experience includes how buyers feel discovering your work, purchasing it, owning it, and talking about it afterward. It’s the foundation of your relationship with them that sticks with them throughout their journey with you and your work. That relationship and that journey are valuable to customers because of the problems you solve for them or the aspirations you help them achieve.
While buying creative work is an emotional journey, its benefits have measurable economic value for your customers. That measurement is the price they’re willing to pay for your work. And that’s where a strong brand comes in.
Your brand acts as a reminder of where that value comes from. For your customers, it tells them why they paid the price they did for your work. For you, it builds confidence that your work is worth that price.
Brand and Pricing in the Same Room
Sitting with this realization forced me to ask a harder question: if brand and pricing are so tightly connected, why do we keep teaching them as separate skills?
That question is what led me to a collaboration I’m genuinely excited about. I’ve been working with ashley from Creative Self-Love Club—a full-time artist and coach who has spent over a decade building a sustainable art business—to design a live workshop that brings these two conversations together.
Rather than treating brand as something abstract and pricing as something mechanical, the workshop focuses on how the two reinforce each other in practice and what changes when artists work through them side by side.
If this is something you’re actively working through, we’re hosting a live Zoom workshop focused on brand positioning and pricing for artists. It’s practical, interactive, and designed to help you apply these ideas directly to your own work. A replay will be available for anyone who can’t attend live.
You can find the details and register here.
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