The Value Exchange: An Introduction

Ah, the Value Exchange. If I had £1 for each time someone has impressed on me the importance of ‘having a clear value exchange’ I’d be - as the saying goes - a very rich man.

Panacea or a late addition to Marketing’ Bullsh*t Bingo (after BIG DATA and CUSTOMER CENTRIC) - the Value Exchange promises ever-deeper loyalty, new prospects flocking to engage and a bullet-proof boost to the bottom line.

It’s a concept we’ve all been getting to grips with. It refers to the much-lauded contract where consumers (we) merrily share our valuable time, attention, personal data and association in return for a customer experience that meets and hopefully, exceeds our expectations..

But, guess what? The Value Exchange is a lot more complex and difficult in application, let alone to sustain.

Even with significant computational advancement, better connectivity and more data than you can shake a reasonably sized stick at, the vast majority of the time the value exchange offered by brands fails to deliver the trust, data and dividends promised.

Why?

As is often the case with seemingly straightforward transactional relationships there is actually a lot more going on behind the scenes.

Whilst on the surface of it the exchange might look something like this:

It is actually going to look something more like this:

And whilst we’ve only shown an example of a complex relationship diagram, imagine how even more complex it becomes when you realise this is just for one customer.

The mind boggles when such seeming complexity is multiplied by the number of individual people and contacts across the average business.

Each person has a different and distinct Customer Journey (relationship with the brand); different missions (reasons to interact); triggered differently (pipeline to missions) and a different sharing appetite (data sharing, permissions and media profile).

When taken together it becomes very clear that just because something suits one person it may not suit the next. And this is why the value exchange has to be individualised to be truly effective. For modern marketers, this is not a ground-breaking revelation. But to be able to do it at scale is what causes the problems.

So in this series of articles we will introduce our new thinking around the value exchange including unpicking the different types of value, and looking at these through the lens of behavioural economics to consider peak and end flow value.

But just to kick off the conversation: how do you define the value exchange?

Keep an eye out for Part Two: Different types of value.