In last week, on my Linkedin profile, I had posted the above image: three different circles, representing the Users Expectations, Users Needs, and Business Solutions, overlapped each other to create a zone called the "Perceived Value", from an article on Medium.com. And got a few private messages from friends in startup, enterprise and manufacture to ask me more details in how to proceed the "Perceived Value" into their products. Therefore, wanna write about it today.
Before moving forward, I would say you had to have the fundamental knowledge about the three rings to fill the puzzles. Please do google or wikipedia the keywords if you don't. Otherwise, this post may be difficult for you to follow. Thanks.
First thing is many has mistaken the "Price/Product Value" as the "Perceived Value". Very often, their product strategy is to adjust their price matching the similar products to compete, and assumed that's how to align with User Expectations. But, very wrong!
If by that logic, everything included services available in market shall be only priced to cover material/labor overhead + logistic expenses + a small % of profit, and some categories or products shouldn't be priced more than 10X than its production or service cost. So, is that the brand premium? Not really. Again, I am not here to direct you for a discussion in pricing strategy, but used that as a metric. Let's put up a physical example - A Plain White Tee.
The "Louis Vuitton X Supreme 2017 Box Logo T-Shirt W/ Tags" sells for $485 at the pop-up stores, and already bids between $2,000 and $2,500 on eBay. Across the world, there're people lining up to fight for one. Yes, we're talking about a pain white t-shirt here. Would it because of manufactured with special material, custom-to-fit, and hand-sewed? Nope. The major differences between any 100% cotton t-shirt and this one are only that has the "Italy" as the origin of production and a distinctive "Louis Vuitton + Supreme" logo illustrated in the front. But the chance is you may be able to purchase a better-quality material tee fitting you better at the 1/10 of that price. So why? How is this be possible?
The Magic Of Perceived Value.
The Louis Vuitton (LV) branded products are classified as luxury goods; And Supreme brand is well-known for its young hipsters demographic. Legitimately, therefore, their brand collaboration and this project are very thoughtfully planned to target and fulfill their own business initiatives, and their joined succeed's not something random.
For LV, this partnership will take this 160 years old brand to the new younger demographic; And for Supreme, their brand/market value will be elevated to a new height.1 Moreover, this unique opportunity has also won them plenty of mainstream market awareness, free press exposure and social vibe.
“If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful,” said Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, the biggest global online retailer.
To dive into the introspective of how Perceived Value was created, I would let yourself to do some homework and take a moment breaking this case down into following value segments for analysis and how the collaboration between two premium brands could lead to such an astonishing result.
Emotional Value | Functional Value | Social Value | Learning Value1 | Contextual Value
Experience, interaction and use are 3 different but overlapping ways to analyze the relationship between a user and a product. When come to design thinking process, your solution shall be elegant, usable, profitable and solving a real user's problem.
1) Identify the Users' Pain Points.
2) Develop your solution to fulfill the Users Need.
3) Survey your Users Group/Audience to understand if your solution meets the Users Expectation (Product/Fit Market) .
4) Perform the Competitive Analysis.
5) Formulate your own Branding Strategy. //BRAND=PRODUCT+SERVICE//
6) Deploy the "HOOK" Model for Viral Marketing.
Hope this blog did give you some inspirations and shed you some lights in designing your best solution.
Thanks for reading! :) Please comment and press ⭐️ below if you liked this article. Your responses would help me to improve the quality of content and other readers.