The Value Wheel: mapping the impact of your marketing actions

If you ask a group of passionate marketers the reason why they love their jobs, you’ll get plenty of answers. One that you’ll probably hear the most is that they enjoy adding value. But what do they mean by value? And what value do they enjoy adding?

• Some marketers will tell that they enjoy being part of their company’s business growth.
• Other marketers will state that they truly believe they’re adding value to society.
• And others may say that what they enjoy the most is building relationships with customers.

From my standpoint, all these answers are quite valid. In fact, marketing can be used to add value to the business, to society, and to customers.

The point is, some of the skills you need to add to one kind of value, are not necessarily the ones that are needed to add another. A marketer with an analytical background may be better at improving processes, while one with a psychology background may be better at understanding customer behaviour patterns.

The number of skills marketers can have is among the reasons why sometimes it is so hard to explain what you do in your daily life. Yes, we all know the official marketing definition but we do not always account for the kind of value that we are adding.

That’s where the Value Wheel comes in.

The Value Wheel: mapping your own value

I first found the Value Wheel while browsing through Medium. The wheel itself is not a personal development kind of tool, but when I saw it, I thought that it might be a good tool to understand what I’m better at and what kind of value I typically add the most.

From a personal standpoint, the wheel helped me realize that most of my skills and marketing actions were targeting the increase of consumer value (no doubt in here) and improving business productivity.

And thanks to it, I now have a clearer vision of my marketing standpoint, and therefore can tell that the area where I’m better at is in improving the relationship that customers have with companies.

The Value Wheel: using the tool in your company

From a technical standpoint, the wheel was originally created for identifying marketing gaps and understanding where a company is focusing its efforts.

The fields of the three rings were created with references from different publications.

• In the inner ring, you’ll find the type of value you can add; the middle ring has the people to whom you want to add value or the area in which may want to act;
• The outer ring has the strategies that may be applied to add value. Some tactics were also presented outside the wheel.

For more information about the Value Wheel, I recommend you read David’s article. If you are a marketer, I also challenge you to take a look and to figure out where your marketing skills are adding the most value.