Q&A
Figuring out what consumers truly value these days is no easy feat. Describe how you discovered 30 ‘elements of value’.
My colleagues and I have been studying consumers for many years. After literally hundreds of studies, about three years ago we consolidated our findings and were able to identify 24 ‘elements of value’ — but we suspected there were more. So, in 2015, we did some new qualitative research — talking directly to consumers about the products they were buying.
As people spoke about why they made a particular purchase, we kept asking questions, trying to get at the fundamentals. If someone told us their bank was ‘convenient’, we didn’t accept that answer: We would probe further by asking, ‘What does convenience to you?’ The consumer would then delve deeper, and say things like, ‘Well, it’s nearby, so it saves me a lot of time and effort’. We did this repeatedly, across all the different statements consumers made, to get at the most granular elements of value. We ultimately did some quantitative
