Values: Each person(a) their pyramid

What has value for whom

Eric Almquist, John Senoir and Nichilas Bloch of Bain & Company have created a modern pyramid based on Maslow and published it in the Harvard Business Review, in which they divide what has VALUE for consumers into four categories:

• Functional values such as time savings, quality, cost reduction or the avoidance of inconvenience.
• Emotional values such as well-being, reducing anxiety, nostalgia, fun or beauty.
• Life-changing values such as heritage, motivation or a sense of belonging and self-realization.
• Self-transcendence: A higher level of self-realization. It involves striving for meaning beyond one's own needs and interests by connecting with others, nature or a higher meaning.

They define a total of 30 values that a product or service can have.

However, the values that individual consumers aspire to depend very much on their personal life situation, demographics, culture and much more. Those who are busy making ends meet have no time for self-realization. While well-off, saturated consumers in industrialized countries like to buy aesthetically designed products, indulge in nostalgia or strive for self-fulfillment, for a small farmer or kiosk owner in a developing country, reducing costs or effort and the possibility of earning money is a much higher value, although these are lower down the actual value pyramid.

What is an important, genuine "value" for one person is of no interest to another: everyone has his or her own personal pyramid of values, and what is at the base of one person's pyramid is at the top for another and does not appear at all for a third. There is only one thing that everyone agrees on: the value of "quality" is non-negotiable. A product can be time-saving, beautiful to look at or cost-reducing: If the quality isn't right, it won't get anywhere.

Which values apart from quality are relevant for whom is therefore individual. As it is simply impossible to manufacture products with all 30 values, in order to be successful, companies need to know exactly which values are in demand among their customers and then focus on these. This can be two or three, or preferably four to six values.

The sector also plays an important role in the values: People who go to the supermarket are looking for something tasty, low prices or to save time. Customers of a bank want to build up assets and carry out their banking transactions in an uncomplicated manner.

In order to use finite resources profitably as a company, it is crucial to focus on the right values. Personas help to ensure that all stakeholders can immerse themselves in the lives of their desired customers to such an extent that the entire team can experience the most important values that move these customers. Based on this, they can then bring the perfect product to the man or woman with the right wording on the right channel.

A relationship pyramid for the perfect product

To find the perfect product, Joni Salminen, professor at the University of Vaasa, suggests a persona pyramid:

The relationship between persona and product designers at the base. Through the persona, the designers are always aware of who they are working for. This is where the necessary empathy arises at the base, which ensures that the product is well received by the customer.

In the middle is the relationship between designer and product. All the insights gained from empathy with the persona take shape here in the mind and under the hands of the designer and are synthesized into the product. Nevertheless, two designers working with the same persona will hardly ever design the same product: One understands the persona this way, the other that way. This is why it is extremely important to incorporate feedback loops and prototype tests and not just leave the personas to the design team. Everyone in the company should be brought to the base of the pyramid and contribute their empathy with the customer persona.

The top of the pyramid represents the relationship between the product and its key performance indicators. They serve as tangible proof of the product's success or as an indication of where improvements are needed. This is a complex task, as external factors can also influence the performance of a product. It therefore requires a careful selection of KPIs that can actually reflect user satisfaction, engagement or other relevant metrics. Analytics tools, user feedback and A/B testing are among the strategies that can help to outline this connection more clearly.

All three levels are interdependent. Ideally, the persona helps designers to create more user-friendly products, which then bring better results for the organization, such as higher user loyalty, user satisfaction and/or sales.

In order for personas to achieve this, they must be data-based and cannot simply "stand around" in space. We therefore create our personas on the basis of 1.5 million representative data sets per quarter from more than 12 countries and more than 1,000 markets. We then use this data to create persona playbooks in which you can get to know your personas in detail and find out where they can be reached and what is important to them.
When it comes to B2B customers or entire buyer centers, we put all the players in relation to each other so that you can target the right person at the right stage of the customer journey and decipher the complex internal processes that lead to decision-making.