The world of business is no different. Ask a business person about the concretes of balance sheets or meeting deliverables or measurables of performance or response and you can get either a verbal answer or a series of spreadsheets and graphs giving you your answer in any degree of granularity you like. But ask about how an audience feels or why they feel a particular way about a product, service, or about the companies and people that deliver it to them, and your in a far more nebulous area. Often the way one group feels and the way the other group thinks the first group feels are two completely different things. Value is another one of those nebulous concepts and it's the concept I'm going to attempt to tackle in the next few paragraphs. What constitutes a "good value" is something that two different people can be miles apart on even when talking about the same thing at the same time. Value is like beauty: It's in the eye of the beholder. And the number of factors that can turn something from ordinary to valuable, and vice versa, are almost too numerous to count.
Let's start by attempting to define value. Dictionary.com lists no less than 15 definitions just for the noun form. The one I tend to lean toward the most is "relative worth, merit, or importance," but again, I'm a nerd and tend to gravitate toward the first definition shown equating its position to being the most important or all-encompassing one. Show this list to a real estate professional and he'll more often than not go for "estimated or assigned worth; valuation" as more applicable definition. Show it to a frantic Christmas shopper and value encompasses a multitude of factors ranging from price to availability to accessibility to quality (definitions 2 through 5 or any combination). So let's leave the dry dictionary world and attempt to define value by it's characteristics. Rory Sutherland, the brilliant and funny UK-based writer of the Wiki-Man column for the Spectator, gives what he considers to be two hard and fast characteristics/qualities of value (and I'm paraphrasing):
1. All value is relative.
2. Persuasion is often better than compulsion when attempting to affect a change in value.
If the current financial crisis and the implosion of the mortgage industry has taught us anything, it is that value is relative. What a house was worth in the eyes of a potential buyer 6 years ago is a far different number than what the exact same house, sometimes the same house in even better condition, could sell for today. So something changed. What was it? Even though the concept of value is an abstract, a lot of what goes into calculating it is often very concrete. Everything from the price of raw materials, the cost of the people to apply their craft to those raw materials, down to the interest rate on the credit (or even the availability of said credit) used to buy the house, geographic location of the dirt on which it sits, etc. While these things are concrete, when the value of any of these changes, so does the value of the sum of all these factors. But one factor has been left out: the factor of human perception. No other single factor can affect a more volatile change in value than this.
The example of a house focuses on what many would consider "real value," either the cost of raw materials or the cost of the people involved with those raw materials. Much different than "real value" is "symbolic value" or value derived from factors other than the aforementioned. Symbolic value can also be placed on intangibles. Much of this type of value is derived as a result of people's perceptions more so than their interactions. Many examples exist of this both in ancient and modern history. For example, many Americans place value on having a clean driving record, or a record unmarred by points assigned to them for various levels of infractions. However, if I were an Italian driver, I would be overjoyed at the existence of points on my driving record, because the whole goal in Italy is to keep the points you are given. You start your driving career out with 12 points and do your best to not have the police take them away because of traffic violations. In this case, the value placed on the points is inverted because the initial reference points are opposites (starting with no points vs. starting with points).
One of my favorite novels is Noble House by James Clavell. It tells the story of two rival "tai-pans" (the Hong Kong equivalent of a CEO; literally from the Cantonese for "supreme leader") of two 1960's era Hong Kong trading companies and how they battle it out for supremacy of their industry while trying to win the favor of a large American investor. One of the CEO's, Quillan Gornt, tries to explain to the wealthy but naive American investor how perception affects value in his world. John Rhys-Davies plays Quillan Gornt in the film adaptation and plays him brilliantly. He starts his speech off...
"There is a bank called the Ho Pak. It's run by a man named Richard Kwang. It's small but solid. I'd put it about the middle of the list, and there are 126 licensed banks in Hong Kong. By noon today, I'm going to start a run on the Ho-Pak."
Lincoln Bartlett, the hot shot American clueless about his new environment replies
"Just like that."
Gornt replies,
"Mr. Bartlett, this is Hong Kong. Things work differently here. Would you like a demonstration?"
Gornt then tells a story...
"One morning, there was a bus queue waiting outside a bank. An old woman looked out her window and thought that it was a line waiting to get into the bank. So she phoned a few friends. And they phoned a few friends. And before long what was imagined became real. All this will take a is a few phone calls. The right phone calls."
I won't ruin the book or the movie, but this very small part of it shows the snowball effect that perception, even misplaced perception, can have on symbolic value.
An example of "symbolic value" from ancient history was demonstrated brilliantly by Frederick the Great of Prussia. Ruling from 1740–1786, he was, for his time, one of the world's most forward-thinking monarchs. One example of this quality was the notion he had of getting more out of the peasantry not by exploiting them a la Louis XIV, but by trying to ensure that they didn't die from famine. He wanted to accomplish this by getting the peasants accustomed to growing and eating two chief crops: wheat, which Prussia had in abundance, and potatoes which were newly introduced. The only obstacle to this was the fact that the peasantry looked in disgust upon the potato solely based on how it grew, how it looked, and the fact that Prussia's enemies also ate the potato.
"The things have neither smell nor taste, not even the dogs will eat them, so what use are they to us?"
- Letter from the Prussian town of Kolberg to Frederick the Great
The potato had a serious image problem that affected its value. Frederick first tried to kick it old-school by making potato production and consumption compulsory. Anyone who has raised kids can guess how that went over. When the peasants rebelled against even the most draconian of measures (during my research for this, I read that there are actually written records from this time period of Prussians being executed for refusal to grow the potato), Frederick apparently decided that a paradigm shift was in order. He ordered that the potato be planted at the palace and nowhere else and that a round-the-clock guard detail be placed where they were growing. Unbeknownst to the peasants, he also ordered that no peasant be apprehended if a theft was attempted. As Rory Atkinson so humorously put it,
"If the peasants knew anything, they knew that anything good enough to guard is good enough to steal."
Thus, one of the earliest known examples of re-branding was born.
Sometimes when a change in value occurs, even the most closely-held truths can be turned on their heads if the circumstances are there to help flip them over. Prussia, apparently being ground-zero for lessons in value, had a great example of this shortly after Frederick the Great's departure, though the monarchy had less to do with this lesson than the military did. During the Prussian's war against the French (some guy named Napoleon was trying to conquer Europe or some such nonsense), many wealthy Prussians were asked to give up their jewelry in order to help fund the war effort. For their contribution, they were given replica jewelry made of cast iron. As a result, the highest status jewelry you could sport as a Prussian socialite was not made of gold or precious gems, but cast iron. Your elevated status was bestowed on the notion that you had made a large personal sacrifice to the war effort. Often the jewelry came with the inscription "Gold gab ich für eisen" or "I gave gold for iron". As cast iron was not considered high fashion everywhere else, this was also a great example of "contextual value," where an object is valuable in its own environment, but diminishes in value when removed from that environment.
So because of this, just as real or intrinsic value can also be defined by a material's costliness and scarcity, so the symbolic value of something can be determined by an object's abundance and indifference to social class. As was shown by the Prussian's, the combination of cast iron + a clever idea + good timing = value. Modern day examples could run the gamut from the social value of the One Laptop per Child Project to the economic value of alternative energy cars. When I boot up my Prius, I like to think that me and Ed Begley, Jr., Harrison Ford, and Robin Williams share a moment. Andy Warhol cited Coca-Cola as an example:
"What's great about this country is America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good." - Andy Warhol
One of mankind's most valuable commodities is controlled not by a single person, cartel, country or corporation. It's time. Because time is so valuable, it is one of the major factors that has driven interface design since the dawn of the study of interface design. How many products have been sold with the tagline "this time saving device?" Add the world of computer technology to this and time becomes even more valuable. It's been the single factor that has increased the number crunching power of the processor we all have in our desktops and laptops. How many acres of rainforest have been saved because of the simple "pushing" of a graphical button on a website? A simple, time-saving and effectively designed interface does two important things: it increases value, and as a result, influences human behavior.
ARGI has taken the lessons learned from its decades of experience serving the publishing industry in developing ARGI Acuity, an audience management system that can add value to the way you interact with your audience as well as the way they interact with you, and combines simplicity with functionality into its unique CodeLess Interactive Controls (CLICs). Take a tour of this revolutionary new product and see how ARGI has used the lessons of the past and present to drive audience interaction and management into the future. I assure you your valuable time will be well spent as the value Acuity can add to your overall marketing strategy for your publication, be it print or digital, becomes evident.
