POINT: John Moore
How someone feels about a business is important. The price someone pays for what they receive is also important. And how “easy” a business is to do business is important.
Brand, price, and convenience are all important to consumers. Combining all three of these aspects separates winning businesses from losing businesses.
However, the most important factor to a customer is efficacy.
Efficacy is a fancy word to express quality. As in, how well something works (or doesn’t).
Before a business can worry about branding, pricing, and being convenient… it must worry about the quality of its offerings.
In today’s marketplace, low-quality products/services will not survive.
The cost of being in the game of business today is to offer products and services that work.
Winning businesses offer up quality products/services first. After that, winning businesses must fine tune strategies based upon branding, pricing, and being convenient to sustain success.
COUNTERPOINT: Paul Williams
What matters to consumers is a combination of brand, price and convenience as well as quality, features, experience, etc… And, the combination of these aspects form our perceived value.
Perceived value is our comparison of the quality of a service/product versus the price to obtain that service/product. Most think about quality strictly from a ‘durability of manufacture’ perspective. Or, ‘how long before it’ll break.’ If it is cheap, it is okay if it breaks sooner than if it were expensive. I find this to be a very old-fashioned, Henry Ford-esque definition.
As I mentioned at the top, perceived value includes and goes beyond brand, price, convenience, quality, features, and experience. It’s the combination of features and benefits that you value that forms your perceived value, and what matters most to you.
Customer preference, for the same product, will differ from person to person. My perceived value is different than yours. And ours may be different from your customer.
The crackerjack marketer realizes these differences and communicates perceived value in ways that are perceived valuable.