Monthly Tonic - Issue 04
The importance of considering the ‘value gap’ when designing your store experience is huge, as brands that exceed their customer’s expectations by delivering more value than expected will leave the customers with that all-important feelgood factor.
Hello...
These are quite surreal and challenging times, but I wanted to make sure our Quinine Community knew the teams are now all working remotely, promoting a positive outlook and here to support you in whatever your new normal brings. As I have been doing over the past few months, I wanted to share a few inspiring articles that are driving our thinking and conversations.
Over the past few weeks, we have been discussing customer value, specifically that feeling you get when you feel you have received greater value than then you have paid for. That feeling people get when they’ve won the lottery. It is a golden chalice to building trust and loyalty with customers. It is traditionally tied to price, but increasingly we see that it is linked to much more. But what defines 'value' is a complex topic ultimately driven by a customer's personal and unique perceptions. Below, I have shared some articles and research papers that help to outline the broad scope of customer value and how different factors can be used to design worthwhile customer experiences.
What are the factors that make up customers perceptions of Value? Value is a perception unique to every one of us. Getting good value is traditionally tied to price, but many factors feed into our perception of the value of an offer. Bain & Company's paper outlines how price holds a certain power in our understanding of value.
Jing Daily's article discusses pricing in the luxury fashion market and illustrates the complexity of 'price point' in our perception of a product and a brand's value. When does the price of the product exceed the customer's perceived value of the brand?
We are all smart shoppers. The smart shopper mindset is now part of everybody's shopping mindset. It's no longer a way to define part of your target market. We are all Smart Shoppers. This insightful research paper examines whether saving time, money and searching for value differs across different product and service sectors, gender or age groups.
What determines our perception of brand value? Fleishman Hillard's post is a great starting point to understand the many things that consumers consider when evaluating the value a brand brings to them.
Consumers have pre-existing ideas of brand standing. This article looks at how brands are segmented in the marketplace. Do you concentrate your efforts with a single core brand or diversify your offer to appeal to different segments?
Here is an excellent example of a brand utilizing its established partnerships (its association with the NFL) to highlight brands added value and benefits, and create great entertainment in-store, while marketing an innovative product.
Understanding your customer's expectations. Understanding what your customers value, what is important to them and where their expectations lie, is key to developing in-store experiences that not only add value but provide unexpected value. You will need to sign up to get this report, but it goes into detail around customers’ expectations of customer services.
All of these insights (and a few others) have fed into an opinion piece we have just written on the Value Gap. It outlines some key factors that customer use to define value and proposes that this feeling one gets when they receive more value than they pay for can be designed into the in-store experience. You can read the article here.
I hope you find these helpful. Feel free to get in touch if you'd like to discuss further.
Kind regards
Quinine
In Quinine's ‘Monthly Tonic' newsletter, we share the key articles, reports and research studies that are driving the conversations we are having here in the studio. Each newsletter is based around a single theme that extends beyond retail to explore broader social and cultural influences shaping the changing world around us. We share a range of insights, perspectives and points of view that are positively impacting the direction we are heading and the discussions we are having with our clients. The following newsletter was shared with all our friends, clients and Quinine community members. If you would like to receive our next issue, please sign up here!
