Resplendent Reading Report: Increasing Value

As famed ad man Rory Sutherland describes, there are two ways to increase the value of your product or service.

1. Make your thing superior. Invest in the R&D, survey users, commission projects to improve your product or service.

This takes lots of resources. Lots of time, lots of money, lots of work hours. What's worse, even if you line up every domino just right, you still might not hit success.

2. Take what you have today and increase its intangible value. Increase its perceived value by repositioning its place in the lives of the people you hope to attract.

Good news: there are many ways to do this. Bad news: none of the ways is easy to get approved by a room full of bottom-line watchers and metrics hawks. Unfortunately, the thing that makes it work is the thing that makes it hard to get approved.

Why is it hard to get these ideas approved? Because they're based on feelings and intuitions rather than cold, hard numbers. As they should be. You increase intangible value by tapping into the ways we feel about the products we bring into our lives. Then, naturally, this changes how we think about them. This is how people work.

Regrettably, most stakeholders aim to reverse this loop to the detriment of their market share: they aim to lead with facts, figures, and features - the unholy trinity of 'F words' - in a quixotic bid to change how people think about their product, rather than how they feel about it. This is a great way to ensure their messaging arrives DOA.

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Here enters the marketer's sacred reminder to finance teams worldwide that most humans perceive the world with their gut first, heart second, and mind dead last.

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Some of the ways you can increase intangible value

You've convinced your leadership team to switch things up to increase tangible value - what now? Here's some inspiration:

• Make your airport smell nicer. Don't have an airport? Start with your room, lobby, branch, wherever you provide your service.

• Reduce the number of choices you offer. "But every consumer wants more choices so they can coldly calculate the one which offers them optimal benefit!" Save it, Keynes. The world just don't work that way. Make it simpler, make it easier. People will gravitate to it like moths to the light.

• Change your messaging. Step outside of yourself and make your messaging relatable to the reader. As communications legend Frank Luntz tells it: it's not what you say, it's what people hear.

Notice the theme here: these all cost much less time, money, and effort than fundamentally changing your product (option 1). You can win at the edges. You just have to see them.

Thanks for joining me. Fare thee well, intrepid thinker!

Jacob