The next time you tell someone that you love Social Media this might be a much truer statement than you realise. Oxytocin is the so called ‘cuddle hormone’ credited with forming the unshakable bond between mother and daughter and in stimulating empathy, trust and generosity. A recent nine year study by Paul Zak, Professor at [...]

August 3, 2010 by Cindy Barnes

Everyone always talks about the rational and immediate term reasons why you need a value proposition, such as: it will improve your sales; it will make it easier for customers to buy from you; it speeds up the sales process and leads to greater profitability. But there are also deeper and subtler reasons which have [...]

August 3, 2010 by Cindy Barnes

People always say to me, “But value is just like beauty, it’s in the eye of the beholder”.  OK, so one man’s value can be another man’s poison (to mix metaphors) but there are ways in which you can start to quantify value.  We always use the equation ‘Value = Benefits minus Cost’, where cost [...]

June 1, 2010 by Cindy Barnes

I was musing recently if my true love had ever considered what I might value for Christmas.  If he had, I thought, I wouldn’t have received the 8mb memory card for my digital camera that I received last year.  I know this sounds ungrateful but if value = benefits – cost (where cost can also [...]

December 10, 2009 by Cindy Barnes

Or, ‘how does having more to choose from affect your choice’? Have you ever felt so daunted by the amount of different things to choose from that you ended up not choosing anything at all? If so, you are not alone, as the results from the following experiment show. A stall was set up in [...]

July 16, 2009 by Cindy Barnes

In the developed world, until last year we had 15 years of uninterrupted prosperity where growth was a permanent feature. Between 1995 and 2005 disposable incomes increased in the slower economies by 10% and in the highest growth economies by as much as 33%. That economic landscape has had a profound impact on our buying [...]

July 16, 2009 by Cindy Barnes

70% of world-class organisations say that if they do give price concessions to customers, they always ensure they get comparable value in return, such as an extended contract or an additional warranty. This compares with only 19% of European firms, according to the 2009 Sales Best Practices Study from Miller Heiman. In other words, European [...]

July 16, 2009 by Cindy Barnes