The Journey is the Destination, Part One: Measuring Value (Not Money)

A humble proposition

A lot of people aren’t going to like hearing this, but: Money is not valuable.

I’m not being pithy or meta here. The state of the world being what it is at the moment, money’s relative lack of significance makes for a fairly unimpeachable broad observation. That’s not what I’m on about. Rather, I’m making a more technical, arguably more radical assertion; a claim about how we, even just as consumers, understand and construct value.

Let’s imagine you just spent a month’s salary on a pair of Nike limited-edition-nft-linked bad boys (and let’s forget, for the moment, the current meltdown in crypto-land). If you were asked why you bought them, it’s highly unlikely you’d answer with what they cost. Ergo, what you paid does not represent the value these trainers hold for you. There’s something else at work there. I want to argue that that matters. I want to suggest we take it seriously. If only because better understanding it can help us orient, prioritize, and cut ourselves loose from things that weigh us down.

So, what is it that you’re valuing in those trainers? It’s a good question. What will probably surprise you is that the answer is almost definitely a qualitative one. Maybe it’s pride of ownership, maybe it’s how they finish off a particular outfit. Maybe you bought them as a gift for someone else, and their value to you is the experience of bringing some joy to that someone. Or, maybe it’s scarcity. The less there is of something, we humans have a tendency to place greater value on it. Given we’re talking about trainers that cost such an eye-watering sum, chances are it’s the latter.

So, knowing that this is what you as a Nike consumer value, what strategy do you think the company is going to take to ensure you always find value in what their brand produces? That’s right. More limited edition, coveted, highly unavailable products.

Nike knows this game plan well enough to draw a map of it from memory. They’re no dummies. They understand the motivations and requirements of their customers’ purchasing decisions. And they go out of their way to build a not insignificant portion of their business around this scarcity op. In turn, at least in this aspect, they’re pretty much guaranteed to keep delivering value to you time and again.

Pretty neat trick, right?

But is it?

If money isn’t valuable, and these shoes you’re unlikely to wear aren’t strictly functional as shoes — what’s going on here, exactly? Again, good question. Breaking that down requires us to deconstruct how value functions out in the world versus how the term gets deployed in conventional usage.

Let’s start here: Have you ever experienced something so seamless and complete that it took your breath away? Perhaps the first time you opened an iPhone and powered it on, or got an upgrade on something that felt too good to be true. Maybe you’ve even just delighted in the simplicity with which a problem was solved. That sort of thing can feel accidental and magical.

It’s anything but.

That doesn’t make it less significant. What you’re experiencing in those moments is value-delivery. Right time, right place, and by the right means. Sticking that landing is a spectacularly complex act. Companies that do it are long-distance runners in understanding their customers, and they do it with a granularity typically reserved for dissertation defenses in university psychology departments. Why? Because they understand that delivering value is fundamental to what brings customers back to them again, and again, and again. Whatever that something is might be cheap, expensive, or anything in between. But you can bet it’s valuable to whoever is buying.

What’s that mean? Better to start with what it doesn’t mean. Companies talk about delivering the “best value” so frequently that the phrase is practically alphabet soup. And that’s largely because the term has so often been used as a stand-in for “cheap”. That crowds out virtually every other consideration, and thus obscures a whole lot of what’s actually at work. You can hardly swing your arm without hitting something people willingly pay more for, based on some calculation beyond mere cost. That calculus is complex. What successful companies often discover is that it’s also not the sort of thing that’s easily measured.

What something does is more interesting than what something is

Quantification as a square-peg/round-hole proposition is a core feature of being human. It’s embedded in the dissonance between the world we experience and how we make it something we can talk about. And in turn, how we think about it. We all toss around terms like beauty and obscenity, and presumably know what we mean when we say them. These are sometimes enormously consequential concepts for social life. Historical epochs can turn on them. That said, virtually none of us can define them. Value poses much the same problem.

The crux of that problem is the distance between being able to perceive and maybe even describe something, and being able to define it. René Descartes dug down on this in the 18th century, developing what we now know as Cartesian Analysis and a foundational building block for measuring what seems unmeasurable: quality. Descartes is a deeper dive for another time, but at the core of his method is that qualities are relational; they derive from a relay between a thing itself and that thing’s observer. Given that qualities don’t derive from a single point, pinning them down is tricky as hell. Being able to triangulate one’s way to measuring what is beautiful, obscene, or valuable in the eye of your target audience, in this particular way, is a power move.

More often than not, there will be more than one quality critical to a company’s customers. Take the iPhone. The beauty of it is a given for most customers, but the experience of its beauty isn’t one-dimensional. Its value-points are varied and intersecting. Just for starters, you’re looking at ease-of-use, highest build quality, and forerunner tech status. All qualities. These things matter to Apple customers. And that’s exactly why Apple banks on people paying nearly any price for something that brings these elements together.

Some notes on North Stars and shifting currents

Identifying that nexus of what your customers value is an efficient means of establishing a target. But it’s only half the story. The other is how your organization internalizes that expression of value. Often, an organization will, understandably, care about things like sales, revenue, costs, and so on. All things that can be directly measured. Perfectly reasonable, given what quantifying processes allows an organization to do. The problem is: If your organization’s only priority is money, it’s doomed.

Why? Well, let’s circle back to those limited-run Nikes you broke the bank for. Their draw for you wasn’t monetary. So if money is a company’s only focus, it’s not paying attention to what you care about; what you value. In this case, you were prepared to blow a month’s pay. So sacrificing what captured your attention or imagination at the altar of making the end product cheaper misses the point entirely. To ensure alignment of values, a company needs to devise a common language that conveys a measure of primary value that works for both its target audience and the organization.

So. How does one do that?

As it happens, it’s more a question of how one doesn’t do it. Or rather, what one doesn’t do, in moving toward it. Let’s say you’re a company that’s established a core understanding of what your audience finds valuable. The next thing you’re going to want to have is a means of quantifying that. Enter stage-left: Data analysts. They’re critical to finding your way to map some relationship between your value dimension and more conventional business measurements like revenue, 30-day retention, units, etc. All of which is critical, in that it offers a means of translating your existing KPI’s into the actual value you want to increase.

This might generate mind-share, over time. Maybe colleagues stop speaking in terms of existing KPI’s and shift into terms pegged to your quantified value measure. This is precisely what you want — an organization that thinks in terms of its audience or users value, rather than the bottom line. Ultimately what you wind up with is a rubric; a vector for making meaning within your organization from the value aligned between user and provider. And thus, you have a means of understanding whether what you’ve busied yourself developing might actually be valuable.

Great news, right? Yes. With a catch: It only matters if you’re prepared to apply it fairly ruthlessly, across your organization. Most organizations are working on many — too many — things simultaneously, with little sense of whether any of them will yield increased value. “Fail quickly!”, etc. And they’ll be evaluating value-creation through easily measured indicators like sales increases, clicks, new subscribers, lead-generation, and so on — blindly tweaking and turning knobs until something clicks. Fishing, essentially. There are upsides to this sort of experimental approach, but its lack of focus can miss critically important things.

As we’ve established, the only thing that’s really going to move the needle for an organization is delivering value. And you can bet dollars to donuts that the people you’re delivering that to couldn’t care less about your sales quota. Conversely, simply driving hell bent for leather toward sales targets for something that isn’t delivering value is both unproductive and soul-crushing. You run the risk of churn on both resources and morale.

Breaking away from that orientation is hard, but if you’ve got a solid understanding of value and the means of measuring how it works for your users — it can be done.

One foot in front of the other

Put bluntly, your measure of value can and should be applied to everything that you want to do. Everything. In so doing, you’ll quickly discover that the things that your audience values most aren’t the things being pursued. That identifies more than what you should be doing; it tells you what to stop doing. Which is arguably more functionally important. A metric for what isn’t worth doing is the proverbial Twelfth Man in a successful strategy.

It follows that if value is being delivered, outcomes improve. For your organization, sure, but more importantly for the people your organization serves. It’s not just the heavy hitters that accomplish this. Train your gaze closer to home. Look at what grooves you’ve carved in your own life, as a result of the constellation of things delivering value for you. That mom and pop pizza spot, that DIY store with the staff more knowledgeable than some tradespeople, or that bike shop that always seems to have the best kits. They might not be in the FANGS club, but you’re going back to those organizations (and they’re thus likely successful) for a very simple reason: They deliver value to you.

At Omio, we’ve discovered that meeting users exactly where they’re at, in exactly what they value, is not just a journey — it’s about journeys, themselves. Because that’s what people come to us for. Sure, on the surface it seems very Live, Laugh, Love. But the reality is that –especially in this moment– the value of travel for many people isn’t reducible or easily quantified in a nexus of cheap/fast. It’s about returning to connection. Connection with others. Connection with familiar, past geographies; connection with the possibility offered by new ones. Connection with how the moment to moment, passed in something other than mere stasis, can invigorate and restore us.

Getting deep with the simplicity of that has clarified our mission in critical ways. It’s allowed us to align with what users value, provided a compass for what does and doesn’t need doing, and transformed how we measure all of it.

Up next? The brass tacks of what that looks like on the proverbial shop floor. Stay tuned.