The Price Of Cheap

The procurement paradox is this: the lowest quote can become the most expensive decision a brand ever makes. Like perfume, a brand lives in the invisible space between quality, trust and desire. Once procurement begins stripping away craft in the name of savings, what remains may still carry the label, but it no longer carries the power.

There is a meeting that happens in organisations across Botswana with remarkable regularity. The marketing team presents a brand campaign. The creative is strong.

The strategy is sound. Then procurement opens the budget line and asks the question that ends the conversation before it has properly begun: “Can we get this cheaper?” The question is not unreasonable. Procurement exists to protect the organisation’s financial resources.

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The problem is not the question. The problem is that it is being applied to the wrong category of expenditure, by people who have not been equipped to understand why it is the wrong question, in a context where the consequences are not visible on any balance sheet for months or years after the damage is done. This is the Procurement Paradox: the function most responsible for protecting the organisation’s financial health is, in many Botswana organisations, the function most responsible for destroying the asset that generates it.

And the counter-argument that holds equally true: procurement is not the villain. It is a function operating rationally within a set of incentives that were never designed with brand value in mind. The organisation that blames procurement for killing its brand has misunderstood where the problem actually lives.

Procurement’s mandate is cost reduction and supplier management. It is measured on savings achieved, compliance maintained, and risk mitigated. In categories like office supplies, IT infrastructure, and logistics, this produces genuine value.

A cheaper printer cartridge is a cheaper printer cartridge. The quality differential is measurable and bounded. Brand investment does not work this way.

A P500,000 campaign that builds genuine market differentiation and increases customer acquisition by 12% over 18 months does not look like a P500,000 investment on the day the invoice arrives. It looks like a P500,000 cost. The incremental revenue it eventually generates looks like a sales result, not a brand result, because the attribution chain between brand investment and commercial outcome is long and invisible to a procurement framework built around direct cost-benefit analysis.

The result is predictable. Procurement benchmarks agency fees against market rates without understanding that the market rate for creative work is not a reliable guide to its value. It selects suppliers on price rather than capability, which in brand work is the equivalent of selecting a surgeon on the basis of their hourly rate.

The elements of brand investment that procurement most consistently reduces are precisely the elements most responsible for brand effectiveness. Strategic brand development is the first casualty. A thorough brand strategy process is expensive and produces a document rather than a visible output.

Procurement sees a P180,000 line item and asks whether the organisation can reduce the scope. The answer is usually yes. The result is a brand strategy built on incomplete data and internal assumptions that cannot surface the insights that justify the investment.

Creative quality is the second casualty. The difference between a P80,000 television commercial and a P350,000 one is not always visible to a procurement officer evaluating two proposals. It is, however, visible to the consumer.

Production quality, casting, and direction are not cosmetic variables. A P80,000 commercial that no one watches has a cost-per-impression that is effectively infinite. A P350,000 commercial that earns organic distribution through social sharing has a cost-per-impression that procurement’s framework cannot calculate because it was not designed to.

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