“There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in.” ~ Leonard Cohen
By Gregory Ronczewski, Director of Product Design at Ibbaka.
When I close my eyes, I hear our incredibly patient art school teachers whispering during the drawing classes: Pay attention to the light. Squint your eyes to reduce the amount of detail you see. Ignore the shadows. Do not draw what you know about the object. Follow the light. We were making fun of them, asking: did you properly squint your eyes, observe and follow... How often did I need to hear this to understand what was being said?
Forty years later, I understand that darkness doesn't exist - there is no such thing as darkness - only the absence of light. We can't add more darkness, can we? We can only add or remove light. The great Duch masters used this principle, leaving behind art that millions admire. But you don't have to go to The Hague to experience it - you can easily find it in Manga comic books where light is the leading player in bringing the characters to life.
Rembrandt van Rijn, Portrait of Herman Doomer, ca 1640 oil on oak panel, the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Jujutsu Kaisen, written and illustrated by Gege Akutami.
We could consider a similar principle when searching for the truth. Is there a thing called a lie, or does it simply register the absence of truth? Or electricity, for that matter - we either have electricity flowing through the grid or we don't. The negative state doesn't exist - only absence or presence.
Although the Ibbaka team is quite busy with work for clients, we have decided to carve out some time to look at the customer journey, learn from it, iterate and better understand the use cases we have collected over the last few months. Part of this exercise is to re-do, or perhaps re-think, the Value Model Ibbaka itself uses (a value model is a set of equations used to quantify the economic value a solution creates for a customer). Becoming a client for a day scenario is an approach often used to weed out poorly designed experiences, leaving room for improvement.
The Value Model is where we usually start our engagements, and this is the space I am writing about. The work usually begins with a collection of the economic value drivers. This time, though, I would like us to explore the world of emotional value drivers. Unlike their economic brothers and sisters, the emotional value drivers do not generate a dollar figure. I found this fascinating because, believe it or not, emotions are responsible for almost every action we take. Here is why.
In the 1970s, scientists discovered that our hearts are surrounded by similar nerve cells as the brain.
“The fact is, we all have two brains. Much to scientists’ surprise, the brains in our heads are obeying messages sent by the brains in our hearts.”
There are now books and peer-reviewed articles written on the subject. Those discoveries led to a new branch of medicine - neurocardiology. Gregg Braden's book, Resilience from the Heart, sheds light on this relatively new approach to understanding how our bodies function. The world of advertising has known about this for a long time. Campaigns are designed to appeal directly to the target audience's emotions, stimulating senses that subconsciously trigger emotions, hopefully leading to a purchase. We could add here some iconic examples of advertising campaigns, but this is not what I am interested in. Knowing the importance of the emotional value drivers, I wonder if there is a way to calculate the impact of each value driver expressed express this in dollars. Since we are re-doing Ibbaka's Value Model, could we at least explore the idea that there is a formula allowing us to attach numbers to emotions?
It could be a flat number. When my family was looking to buy a house on Bowen Island near Vancouver, the ocean view added $100k regardless of the base price. Perhaps we could devise a mathematical equation, a formula for calculating how much money will be generated by an emotional value driver. Or, it could be a percentile derived from the economic model.
Value drivers are expressed in words. That's the only way to capture the nature of the driver, whether economic or emotional. There is this concept called Kansei Needs or profound needs of the market. We can produce a set of Kensei Words - adjectives describing the product or service. According to a Wikipedia article, "Compared to other methods in Affective Engineering, Kansei engineering is the only method that can establish and quantify connections between abstract feelings and technical specifications."
Measure Emotional Drivers in Brands article by Hector René and Humberto Alvarez from Barcelona, Spain, is another good read on the Kansei Words concept.
For instance, we could assign a score number to words describing a value driver. Google does it with their paid keywords. Some words carry a lot of value, while others are considered less "expensive." Here is a sample of emotional value driver from one of the distant projects:
"Adapting to challenging work with constantly changing technology."
With a rating applied to each word, we could create an aggregate and set a threshold to indicate if the emotional aspect of the model is trending above a certain level or below. Let's call it the emotional dollar indicator.
It feels good to see that there are other ways that people try to figure out the connection between emotion and pricing. In a Hedonic Regression Model, the dependent variable is the price (or demand) of the good, and the independent variables are the attributes of the good believed to influence utility for the buyer or consumer of the good. It decomposes the item being researched into its constituent characteristics and obtains estimates of the contributory value for each.
How about Behavioral Economics? This field studies how people make decisions and allocate resources based on emotions and subjective well-being. It can show how people trade off money for emotional benefits or vice versa.
Let's not forget the Economics of Happiness. Here is a quote from Tom Lane's article titled How does happiness relate to economic behaviour?
"Happiness is a concept of such fundamental importance that it has preoccupied philosophers and religions for millennia. Happiness, and how it can be maximized, has long been of interest to economists, too. Utility entered economic analysis as a close synonym of happiness; although the two concepts later departed from one another, in recent decades economists have developed a renewed interest in happiness and ways it can directly be measured."
Happiness may not be central when it comes to setting better prices, increasing revenue, profitability and customer retention, which Ibbaka deliveres to B2B SaaS customers through the use of Valio - a configurable and flexible value pricing engine that can model the packages of even the most complex and varied organizations. However, happiness is an underlying desire shared by every human being. And if we make decisions, especially the important ones, like renewing a subscription on a SaaS product, it would benefit everyone if Ibbaka's Value Model had a way not only to add the emotional value drivers to the model but also observe the impact of each value driver expressed, if not in dollars, then at least in showing the trend, the direction or the position related to the threshold of sorts. I know it's a tall order, but since every invention starts with a thought, here is mine, vibrating at a high frequency, looking to resonate in generating ideas that energetically connect, forming a common desire to solve it. Why not?
