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Better Value; Better Business Introduction

Introduction – Welcome to this podcast. I am your host, Alex Stacey and I am very excited about starting to share with you some fascinating things I have learned on the subject of value. 

This podcast is timely as we are in a new age of starting to automate marketing and HR processes. This is to manage customers, members if you are an organisation, and your staff and contractors. Marketing and sales automation is a powerful tool which means being in a position to deliver touchpoints more quickly and effortlessly. But it is no good getting efficient at doing the wrong thing;  firstly you have to do the right thing even if it means more consideration and a slower start. And that right thing is to identify what your value-proposition is for your target audience in order to get the experience and messaging optimised. And that includes defining really high resolution personas for your CRM Systems. I mentioned experience optimisation – and I will get into experience in another episode but just to state right now that people mostly want experiences, not products. They want the experience that your product or service can give them. 

So this podcast is about value and values – some history of value about how value is perceived, created, formed, when, who by, and how. Also what conditions do you need to create value and how does it thrive. This includes for and by all your organisation’s stakeholders. Once you understand about value you are in a position to maximise the value in your organisation and reap the rewards as you will strengthen your product and service design, processes, brand, customer and staff loyalty. Additionally I will discuss evaluating - how we measure value. You will become better at analysing your own motives for purchases and evaluating experiences to see if they really return the value you are seeking.

To start with, I plan to take you on a journey to understand why we cannot understand our stakeholders via economic models. We will look at our  risk-averse decision-making processes and we will need to consider behavioural insights and how we make choices, how we are persuaded, how we evaluate service….  we will also have a small peek at the value of time and fungibility. I will throw in interesting facts from behavioural research too. I look forward to interviewing guests who have specialist knowledge or experiences around value. I will recommend books and authors and places for you to get more information which I will also list on my website. We will look at how you can find out more through researching your own stakeholders and how to apply this knowledge in practice, in what circumstances and the benefits you can gain. 

You might want me to tell you a bit about who you are listening to so in a nutshell, I have been working for around 30 years and I graduated as a mature student from The University of Buckingham’s Business School having completed a Masters degree in Strategic Marketing and Customer Experience Management and my dissertation was about value-creation in experience. I have  recently started a business – which consults on and researches your organisation’s value through the first hand experiences of customers and employees and ways in which you can co-create additional value with your stakeholders. 

My business is  called AS-Insights – that is with a hyphen – so that is my initials: AS hyphen insights. Dot com and you can follow me on Linked In and Instagram. Finally if you do have questions you would like answered in one of the shows you can write to me at info@as-insights.com

So why would I also start such a big project as podcasting? Undertaking the project of researching, writing and creating this podcast alleviates the itch in me to do further academic work via a Doctorate and fulfils the urge in me to teach and share – which seems to be so instinctive in so many people judging from how generous relative strangers are with their advice. So that is an intrinsic motive. Another intrinsic motive is that it gives me the opportunity to reach out to talented professionals to learn about their experience. A third intrinsic motivation is about sharing an “Aha – Eureka” moment on reading  the 2008 paper by Vargo and Lusch titled “Evolving to a New Dominant Logic” closely followed by Prahalad and Varaswamy’s  DART model. This takes marketing beyond ‘relationship marketing’ to a new paradigm. 

My extrinsic motive is that a podcast is a touchpoint where potential clients can find out more about me – it creates lots of material which I can then refer to and re-purpose for my brand storytelling. You get a chance to think about whether you like me and form a positive or negative attitude to me. This jargon will be explained in the podcasts. 

 Some podcasts make money and I have as yet no idea if this one will or even recoup its investment. I could have invested in Bitcoin instead but I have already listed four intrinsic motives for preferring podcasting.

That is enough about me and I hope you will now click onto the next episode where I get stuck into understanding how our minds work. I have really enjoyed doing the research into our minds – and as we all have one (presumably) then you might find it interesting too to see if this resonates with your own experience.