Understanding
Felt Value to Incite Growth
Clients frequently ask for assistance in assessing
ways to improve marketing and sales communication processes and materials to enhance the likelihood that prospective customers
will move from generalized interest to making a choice to purchase their company's products and services.
Based on internal sales and marketing experiences, clients perceive there
is a substantial “white space” for their offerings – customers who should have been users but have
not made the change. This assessment is based on side-by-side analytic attribute comparisons with competitive products
and services, by prospective customers’ positive evaluation of their product, and by current user feedback
of its value in advancing them along their progress path.
Clients are looking for insights to develop new sales and marketing tools for converting the entrenched
behavior of “white space” customers into buyers of their product. More specifically, the challenge
is to find out how to convert what you tell customers your brand is and does (your explicit product-out features
and benefits value) to a customer’s implicit felt-value (the value they place on a product based on the way they
frame their context and experiences).
Peter Drucker’s observation: “The customer rarely buys what the business thinks it sells him” is the
essence of every client's interest in pursuing customer-based research. What he was saying and what
clients are experiencing is that the value of a product is not merely frozen in its attributes and benefits but it also
includes the felt-value that the customer assigns to it in the context of the “jobs” it could be “hired”
to do.
At Research Consortium the approach
is intended to analyze these two aspects of the relative market value of a client's offering:
· Explicit
Product Value – Value the customer sees in the meaning of
o Product benefits
o Brand image
o Corporate brand image
· Felt
Value – Value the customer assigns based on the particular job or jobs they might hire it to do.
o The imagined job outcome
– If I make this change from what I’m using today, what meaning will it have for me?
Understanding these two sources of value are critical for developing
new marketing and sales approaches to better engage new customers and turn targeted prospects who now say, “That’s
cool” into prospects that see how “hiring” our client's product can put them on a path to heightened
progress in their business and consumer lives.
To get customers to change – buy into the value of something new – a company's marketing and sales teams
need to provide information that helps the customer create their own sense of what the value means for them. The
research is intended to shine a light on what those information elements are.
