Anomaly: The New Economics of Value Design
How understanding utility can lead to priceless user experiences.
Let me tell you how curiosity turned into a 5-year journey about understanding what value really is. Download a copy of the work here.
In 2016 I became fascinated by what I now call the idea of value or Value Design. Then, my job at one of West Africa’s largest advertising agency was to uncover rare insights about the consumer and by those make recommendations that will be applied to business growth.
But curiousity took over and I began asking questions.
How do we determine the utility of anything? Who decides what value is? Is there a framework for arriving at value and testing the elasticity of that proposition? What is the consumer’s system for deciding what is valuable?
Yes, there are basic variables like needs, wants and aspirations, or Activities, Interests, and Opinions. But they shift one too many times. It had to be a different and more instinctive set of considerations for someone who is not there when the magical big idea that solves everything lands.
Being the consumer behaviour authority in the room, every word out of my mouth carried weight. The outcome of whatever I had to say about her choices must be nothing short of insights becoming impact.
It is still the same today. Even at a strategic management and business operations level the skills just never leave you. They make you a behavioural pattern cyborg.
The plot thickens.
Here is my initial concern: we can influence the consumer’s initial consideration, too easy. But knowing that repeat performances are crucial to return on Customer Acquisition Cost––which has to yield thrice that spend within the Customer Lifetime Value––how do we retain loyalty?
To own a viable product proposition, we must begin to define and design value differently.
So, Anomaly was born.
The project explores what a paradox of the human condition teaches us about understanding, estimating and appropriating the value of anything, from products to policies.
Interacting with business leaders and subject-matter experts in technology, finance, marketing, and consumer goods has shed more light on how some products become more successful than others––value proposition design.
Applying the design component compels us to go beyond how good the idea or words feel, to doing the work of making choices that are unique to a product and the end user.
A well designed Value Proposition becomes a language only you and your consumer tribe understand.
Better than that Value Design thrives in four areas:
- Overcoming biases
- Determining what is peerless about your product from at least two critical spectrums before committing further
- Presents a framework for aligning products with consumer expectation, thereby becoming an experience.
- Puts your brand at the forefront of an adaptive product-market fit
Fundamentally, it makes you unf***withable.
Over the years, the answers found have helped me develop methods that have influenced my approach to strategy, growth and products.
In this issue, I make public the preliminary outcome of my journey. I hope it sets the context for new ideas, conversations and ways of creating useful and profitable products.
As I have been asked many times, this might become a book; but the work has only just begun.
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