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The amount of value in any given product will always lie in the eye of the beholder. Yet universal building blocks of value do exist. Two senior Bain & Company experts describe the 'elements of value' for both business-to-consumer and business-to-business products. They explain how they have organized these elements (30 for B2C and 40 for B2B) into a hierarchical pyramid inspired by Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs-with basic value offerings at the bottom and aspirational offerings at the top. Apple's iPhone, for instance, covers 11 of the 30 possible elements of value for consumers. The challenge for leaders today, they argue, is to compare their value offerings to their competitors; seek to close value gaps; and come up with innovative new combinations of value.

As B2B offerings become more commoditized, the subjective, sometimes quite personal considerations of business customers are increasingly important in purchases. To discover what matters most to B2B buyers, the consulting firm Bain analyzed scores of quantitative and qualitative customer studies. All told, it identified 40 discrete "elements of value," which fall into five categories: table stakes, functional, ease of doing business, individual, and inspirational. The elements range from strictly objective--those related to pricing and specifications, for example--to more subjective ones, such as reducing the buyer's anxiety and enhancing his or her reputation. Understanding this full range of rational and emotional considerations, and tailoring the value proposition to the ones customers prize most, is critical to avoiding the commodity trap.

What consumers truly value can be difficult to pin down and psychologically complicated. But universal building blocks of value do exist, creating opportunities for companies to improve their performance in existing markets or break into new markets. In the right combinations, the authors' analysis shows, those elements will pay off in stronger customer loyalty, greater consumer willingness to try a particular brand, and sustained revenue growth. Three decades of experience doing consumer research and observation for corporate clients led the authors-all with Bain & Company-to identify 30 "elements of value." Their model traces its conceptual roots to Abraham Maslow's "hierarchy of needs" and extends his insights by focusing on people as consumers: describing their behavior around products and services. They arrange the elements in a pyramid according to four kinds of needs, with "functional" at the bottom, followed by "emotional," "life changing," and then "social impact" at the peak. The authors provide real-world examples to demonstrate how companies have used the elements to grow revenue, refine product design to better meet customers' needs, identify where customers perceive strengths and weaknesses, and cross-sell services.

A customer-research technique that requires respondents to make a sequence of explicit trade-offs when choosing their preferred product attributes can help companies get a far more accurate read on what customers desire.

Consumers are regularly blitzed with thousands of marketing messages--television commercials, telephone solicitations, supermarket circulars, and Internet banner ads. Still, a lot of these messages fail to hit their targets or elicit the desired response: the purchase of a product or service. It has been very difficult for companies to isolate what drives consumer behavior, largely because there are so many possible combinations of stimuli. In this article, consultants Eric Almquist and Gordon Wyner explain that although marketing has always been a creative endeavor, adopting a scientific approach to it may actually make it easier--and more cost effective--for companies to target the right customers. "Experimental design" techniques, which have long been applied in other fields, let people project the impact of many stimuli by testing just a few of them. By using mathematical formulas to select and test a subset of combinations of variables, marketers can model hundreds or even thousands of marketing messages accurately and efficiently--and they can adjust their messages accordingly. The authors use a fictional company, Biz Ware, to describe how companies can map out on a grid a combination of the attributes (or variables) of a marketing message and the levels (or variations) of those attributes. Marketers can test a few combinations of those attributes and levels and can apply logistic regression analysis to extrapolate the probable customer responses to all of the possible combinations. The company can then analyze the experiment's implications for its resources, revenues, and profitability. The authors also present the results of their work with Crayola, in which they used experimental design techniques to test that company's e-mail marketing campaign.