You’re probably trying to create value. If you aren’t you should be. After all, that’s what all marketing disciplines hope to achieve. But do you know what ‘value’ is? If you don’t – I’m sure we all claim to know, but secretly are uncertain – you can’t deliver it. Hopefully the next 600 words will help you overcome this.
What’s Value?
Research is no different to any product – it must create value. Simple, right? Wrong. Creating value isn’t simple. It’s complicated. Before you know how to create value, you must know what value is. Complicating things further, value has several definitions:
- Investment definitions of value are defined as the amount of money an agent will exchange for a good or service
- Customer models of value are based on a product’s cost vs. benefit trade-off
- Psychologists define value as the importance someone places on something that’s part of their lives
These definitions, while interesting, aren’t that relevant to researchers hoping to create value for clients. The Austrian School of Economics provide a more valid definition. The Austrian School believes that social phenomena result exclusively from an individual’s actions and motivations. The school’s founder, Carl Menger, wrote:
“Value is therefore nothing inherent in goods, no property of them, but merely the importance that we first attribute to the satisfaction of our needs”
Given the Austrian School’s belief that individual motivations solely drive social phenomena, value is therefore an individual’s perception of how much a product will satisfy them.
What does this mean for research?
The key terms within the Austrian School of Economics’ definition are: 1) individual 2) perception
1. Individual
Most researchers work with multiple businesses. In each business, research engages multiple stakeholders. Value’s individual nature means that there’s no universal rule for how researchers create value. One size doesn’t fit all. One size fits one.
This means that understanding individual businesses and individual stakeholder’s needs is vital in enabling research to create value. Research-based value creation is different for mature FMCG brands vs. start-up tech brands and different for product developers vs. campaign creatives. The more sensitive research is to this individualism, the more value it can create.
Tangibly, this means knowing a client’s current business reality is vital. Speaking to individual stakeholders to understand their needs, pivotal.
2. Perception
Al Rise and Jack Trout refer to brand positioning as ‘the battle of the mind’. The same battle exists with how research engages with businesses. If research engages with a business at distance, in its own language and concludes at the debrief, it’ll limit its value perceptions.
Research therefore needs to position itself as a value creator in how it’s delivered to businesses. This involves:
- Avoid distancing research from its end users: immerse research within a business. This means starting research programs by engaging a wide audience and understanding them. Doing so embeds research within the wider value creation chain
- Don’t use research language: speak the language of the business you’re trying to create value for. This demonstrates knowledge of the business, gets research’s message heard and shows that research is part of the business – not a complex outsider
- Use the debrief as the start – not end – point: guiding the broader stakeholder audience through their application of research outcomes demonstrates a longitudinal value not visible if research ends at debriefing
In short: discover the unique ways your clients & stakeholders define value, design and deliver research accordingly. Do this in close quarters with your client, speaking their language, guiding them from research to insight to application to value creation.
