Читать книгу Blind Spot - Nathan Shedroff - Страница 12

While it’s more difficult to measure and it’s not a traditional business approach, premium value is very real and definitely valuable. If they make no place for it, business people are actively blinding themselves to the highest value there is in the market.

Not everyone pays more for premium value in everything they buy. Most have certain categories in which these types of value mean more to them—and some they couldn’t care less about—for example, Porsche and Cartier, Hilton and Nike, Apple and Whole Foods.

These, of course, are generalizations. But some people care deeply about the food they eat; others just consider it food. Some give great care to the clothes, accessories, hair and makeup they put on; others eschew these for more generic choices. The point is that your customers engage on premium levels for many, but not all, things, and it’s your job to understand which.

All of the above examples are evidence that premium value exists. It’s often difficult to tease the five values apart, in the wild, since all five are active at all times (potentially). And all are part of what makes a relationship engaging, attractive, and valuable. No company that wowed investors with huge valuations on an IPO or sale did so on the basis of functional and financial value alone. In fact, for most companies, the more premium value you generate, the bigger the share it has of your overall value. If you’re innovating to drive growth and value in a company, the best kind to focus on is premium value. And, you can’t get there focusing only on features and price.

There are rare opportunities to “see” this value distinctly when a company goes public or is acquired by, or merges with, another. At these moments, the balance and income statements of a company are distinctly different before and after the sale. For example, when Instagram was purchased by Facebook in April 2012, the “books” said that Instagram (then only 13 people) was worth around $86 million. This represented their total assets (including a $50 million investment the week prior to purchase).

The company was “valued” at $500 million before the sale, but this wasn’t a real number, just a guess, based on past valuations of similar companies. According to the book, if the company had to shut down and sell everything off, it was only worth that $86 million.

But Facebook bought Instagram for $1.1 billion! That’s a huge difference! Why did Facebook pay almost 13 times that $86 million figure? Where did that value exist in the company’s financial statements? It was even double the amount that Instagram’s investors guessed the company was worth.

We contend that the extra $1 billion that Instagram received in the sale was the result of the premium value it had built. Before the sale, this extra billion dollars didn’t appear to exist and wasn’t tracked, nor was it trackable. The day after the sale was final, however, that extra $1 billion was very real and had to be put into the balance sheet somewhere—and there’s a special catch-all cell just for these things. It’s called “goodwill” and it’s a place to shove the extra money companies make when they’re purchased or offer their IPO.

How could $1 billion go missing? Or how could it not be visible one day, but very visible the next? The majority of the business world will say that there are plenty of reasons why Facebook (and others) pay so much for companies like Instagram: it’s a calculation of the value of future business, or how much it’s worth to keep these companies out of their competitors’ hands. But that doesn’t answer why the numbers are often so high or how they’re calculated.

To us, this is the value of the relationships that Instagram had created. (We also know from statements that Facebook had made that it was interested in Instagram’s users and didn’t want Google, Apple, or someone else to get them.) It certainly wasn’t Instagram’s code. Google could have likely put a team of engineers on the project and in a few months created a very similar set of features that were also free to users. That would have cost them much less for the “same” thing (if all you were looking at were the features).

This isn’t just the case for software and other technology companies. When Pixar was acquired by Disney in 2006, it was “worth” just under $2 billion, according to the company books, but “earned” an extra $2.3 billion in goodwill (an extra 100%). Nextel was “worth” $5.3 billion when it was purchased in 2004, but “earned” an extra $30 billion in goodwill (that’s almost 680%!). Every healthy company, in every category, has premium value, but no one knows just how much until events like these. It’s hidden from view by traditional business measures and blind to those who practice it.

It’s fair to say that premium value is the largest component of relationship value (which comprises all five types of value). There’s no traditional way to measure relationship value (or its premium component), but it would be foolish to claim it didn’t exist.

And yet, the first two kinds of value, functional and financial, because they’re relatively easy to measure, get most of the serious attention in business. Sometimes, as in the nonprofit world, or even in some places in government, they’re not as stressed, but they’re very visible. The other forms of value, the premium types, are also there, but blind spots cause companies to ignore them in a business setting, hand them off to people not accountable for the bottom line, or treat them as mercurial or random.

Because they’ve been difficult to define, articulate, and measure, some companies, such as ad agencies, have a tendency to lump the types of premium value together and call them emotional, because they’re all equally invisible—unlike basic value, they take place on the inside, in people’s states of mind. Branding firms do the same thing, but lump it all under brand (and, unfortunately, never differentiate the components). Regardless, they’re distinct and need to be approached differently if you hope to innovate in order to grow premium value.

There is also a lack of effective tools for measuring and understanding premium value’s impact on relationships. It’s not enough to know it’s there. Most business owners don’t know how to visualize and understand this value, let alone relationships—and, less still, how to innovate to improve them. For them, these types of relationship values are equally significant blind spots. Most leaders know intuitively that these relationships are important and valuable, but they fail to prioritize or act on them when making either strategic or tactical decisions. Relationships don’t show up on the income statement or on the balance sheet after the fact (in owner’s equity). They don’t make an appearance in strategic discussions, even though their long-term effect on both should be obvious. In fact, neither revenue nor profit is sustainable without the foundation that relationships provide.

At this point, we can’t fully solve the “naming, defining, measuring” problem of premium value entirely, although Nathan and Steve gave it a shot in the book Making Meaning: How Successful Businesses Deliver Meaningful Customer Experiences (New Riders, 2006). Although there has been some progress in developing metrics, these forms of value have a certain intangibility (they exist only the mind, after all!) that will probably always make them tougher to work with quantitatively than the other, more basic forms of value. However, whereas relationships can’t be easily measured, they can, in fact, be worked with to provide superior value for customers, to build superior returns for investors, and to build enduring relationships between businesses and customers that benefit both hugely.