How Do We Provide Value?

Try the value menu. Take a value home today. Your friendship is valuable to me. We value your opinion. Your local choice for value. We stand for real value.

We hear and see the word value used all day.

Every offering, every product, every company offers us value. The word is used like it's some magically field leveler. Yet it feels like a discarded gum wrapper.

The exchange of money or goods or services that is considered to be a fair equivalent for something else.

We marketing strategists often try and find clients’ value proposition. It looks great when you write it up in a proposal or internal collateral. But is value not similar to branding where the decision is up to the customer?

An ideal accepted by some individual or group.
Homemade, all natural, locally grown, owned and operated, quality assured,
new and improved, limited time offer.

These are extraneous words we all may be guilty in using to not necessary fool people but rather to enhance the offer.

One way to differentiate is to remember the core of our unique selling proposition is our abilities that no one else can offer.

Kneale Mann

image credit: istock
original post: December 2010

Finding Value

Try the value menu. Take a value home today. Your friendship is valuable to me. We value your opinion. Your local choice for value. We stand for real value.

We hear and see the word value used all day.

Every offering, every product, every company offers us value. The word is used like it's some magically field leveler. Yet it feels like a discarded gum wrapper.

The exchange of money or goods or services that is considered to be a fair equivalent for something else.

We marketing strategists often try and find clients’ value proposition. It looks great when you write it up in a proposal or internal collateral. But is value not similar to branding where the decision is up to the customer?

An ideal accepted by some individual or group.
Homemade, all natural, locally grown, owned and operated, quality assured,
new and improved, limited time offer.

These are extraneous words we all may be guilty in using to not necessary fool people but rather to enhance the offer. The question remains, if we all use a version of the same claim, how do we differentiate?

How do you measure value?  

knealemann | email


image credit: istock

Google | Grad School to Scale

Are People Important?

Much has been written about human business in the last couple of decades. Companies have attempted to make their work spaces more enjoyable and compassionate. Some have workout areas, flex time, child care and even some allow you to bring your dog to work.

I attended Carleton University’s Spring Leadership Luncheon and A.D. Dunton Award Presentation in Ottawa yesterday. It was great to see some people I hadn’t seen in a while and meet a whole bunch of leaders in Ottawa from all walks of business.

From Ottawa to Google

This year’s A.D. Dunton Award recipient was Dr. Shona Brown who is the Senior Vice President of Business Development for Google and former Carleton grad. She is very sharp and very funny. She talked a bit about her career and journey but gave us a snapshot of life at Google Campus in Mountainview, California.

Some highlights:

If you want to work at Google, be prepared to jump head first in to the team mentality. Very few decisions are made by a single person but rather by committee. Dr. Brown calls it controlled chaos. That includes when you are hired.

Your Ideas Are Encouraged

Brown confirmed that Googlers can devote 20% of their work time developing their own ideas. That’s one day a week or as she outlined, most block off a week here and a week there to get away from their day job to flush things out.

If the idea is strong enough, they may get one or two colleagues to help take it further. If the idea gets to the next step and through some stringent hurdles, resources are applied to see where it can go.

No Hiding

She added that Google is “a well financed graduate school to scale. It looks for passionate critical thinkers and hires smart generalists."

Often, senior management at Google gather staff and field open and tough questions. As Brown says “There’s no ducking”. If you build an open collaborative space, the bosses can’t hide in their office

Always In Beta

Google is a huge company that lives in beta but does not do it void of the bottom line. There is constant experimentation and in that, spectacular failures. Dr. Brown said one issue she wishes her company would do better is shutting down ideas that aren’t successful. The downside of living in beta.

What human things can you apply to your company that seem to work for one of the largest tech firms on the planet?

@knealemann
Helping you integrate all you do with all you do.

photo credit: google

Google Buzz or Beta?

Last week, CBC's Doc Zone aired a documentary feature entitled Google World.

It is a brief flash at life at world headquarters where think tanks and creative minds meld. It's a human experiment forever in beta.

The film describes life at Google as a neverending co-creative place to work.


Collaborative teams embrace emerging technologies and encourage ideas. Everyone walks around with laptops creating and devising. Sounds cool.

In the documentary, Google CEO Eric Schmidt talks about the importance of trust. No argument here, we have to trust these companies with our information.

The question remains, do have a choice? It's okay, it's in beta.

The company is busy. It introduced Wave last year and their purchase of Aardvark last week. And let's not forget all the others.

Google Buzz has been introduced as the company’s latest leap in to the social web but it has been anything but smooth. Last week, the news cycle was jammed with stories of Google Buzz and its privacy issues.

The company was quick to respond with claims that they figured we wanted it this way and they are working on the problem.

Google is a company that gives us the impression they are always working on the problem, always in beta and experimentation. They want our input through their collaborative products and we are to trust them, right?

As a publically traded company employing thousands of the best and brightest, you’d think they would iron out these hiccups before rushing to market. It was a simple mistake, right? Sure, it's in beta.

The Search is ON.

The company is in a heated battle with Microsoft, Facebook and Yahoo for digital supremacy. Strange things happen when greed creeps in to design and collaboration.

I use Google products and I like them but to say that privacy is a top priority would be among the biggest of all understatements. Do we really know who has our stuff? No worries, it's in beta.

A company that houses zettabytes worth of personal information in thousands of acres of secured server farms all over the world claims it was caught off guard on this little privacy glitch on Google Buzz.

And we believe them, right?

(editor's note: this blog post is in beta)

@knealemann
strategy. marketing. social media.

photo credit: google earth