Quality and Innovation

I got really excited when I discovered Morris Holbrook’s 1996 piece on customer value, and wanted to share it with all of you. From the perspective of philosophy, he puts together a vision of what we should mean by customer value… and a framework for specifying it. The general approach is straightforward:

“Customer Value provides the foundation for all marketing activity…
One can understand a given type of value only by considering its relationship to other types of value.
Thus, we can understand Quality only by comparison with Beauty, Convenience, and Reputation; we can understand Beauty only by comparison with Quality, Fun, and Ecstasy.”

There are MANY dimensions that should be addressed when attempting to characterize the Voice of the Customer (VOC). When interacting with your customers or potential customers, be sure to use surveys or interview techniques that aim to acquire information in all of these areas for a complete assessment of VOC.

The author defines customer value as an “interactive relativistic preference experience”:

• Interactive – you construct your notion of value through interaction with the object
• Relativistic – you instinctively do pairwise comparisons (e.g. “I like Company A’s customer service better than Company B’s”)
• Preference – you make judgments about the value of an object
• Experience – value is realized at the consumption stage, rather than the purchase stage

Hist typology of customer value is particularly interesting to me:

Most of the time, we do a good job at coming up with quality attributes that reflect efficiency and excellence. Some of the time, we consider aesthetics and play. But how often – while designing a product, process, or service – have you really thought about status, esteem, ethics, and spirituality as dimensions of quality?

This requires taking an “other-oriented” approach, as recommended by Holbrook. We’re not used to doing that – but as organizations transform to adjust the age of empathy, it will be necessary.

Holbrook, M. B. (1996) . “Special Session Summary Customer Value C a Framework For Analysis and Research”, in NA – Advances in Consumer Research Volume 23, eds. Kim P. Corfman and John G. Lynch Jr., Provo, UT : Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 138-142. Retrieved from http://www.acrwebsite.org/search/view-conference-proceedings.aspx?Id=7929