value again

The story goes that one day, as Socrates was philosophising about one thing or another, an acquaintance approached him and said, “Socrates, do you know what I just heard about Diogenes?”



Socrates: stopped the acquaintance and asked him to pass his message through the Triple Filter Test.

The three filters being:

1. Truth. Have you made absolutely sure that what you are about to tell me is true?
2. Goodness. Is what you are about to tell me about Diogenes something good?



3. Usefulness. Is what you want to tell me about Diogenes going to be useful to me?

The fella was flummoxed as he could not back up the message with any of the 3 criteria and trotted off bewildered.

And Socrates never found out that Diogenes was shagging his wife.

This story retold from Jonathan MacDonald's excellent blog.

It made me recall the theory of value I posted about some time ago.

The components of tangible value being:

1. Beauty
2. Gain
3. Good

Notice that truth is not present in this triangulation.
For Socrates too, there was probably no value for him in knowing the truth about what his wife and Diogenes were up to.

There was a story I heard about a doctor with a pregnant Muslim woman patient. She asked for a line to say she was not pregnant when the truth was, she was.
The reality was that the woman faced being potentially murdered to preserve the 'honour of the family'.
The doctor took the view that the value of life was more important than the value of 'truth', and issued the note.

From an advertising perspective (that's what this blog is supposed to be about, after all) though the triple filter test is a good rule of thumb.

Truth - is the message being transmitted actually true and transparent? Or is it at least a 'true lie' - a story we are happy to tell ourselves?

Good - Is the world a better place for knowing or acting upon this thing?

Useful? - How does our product/service/message enrich the experience of the customer and make them want to share it?

Kinda thing.

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cheap

Cheap is the last refuge of the unimaginative, someone once said.
At the end of the day, there's always some other oik who can work out how to be cheaper than you.

Cheap doesn't mean value.

And if all you have to compete on is price, you're as good as finished.

This nugget from Harrison Ford in this morning's Metro reminded me.

'When I came into [the movie] business I was under contract to a studio for $150 a week.
One thing I learned quickly is that the studios had no respect for a person who was willing to work for them for that amount.
I realised that the value I put on my own work was the value and respect I would get back'

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theory of value

A bit more on Japanese educator and philosopher Tsunesaburo Makiguchi mentioned in the previous post, and whom I’ve been reading up on lately.

Makiguchi reckoned that the ‘lifelong happiness’ of students to be the goal of education, rather than simply churning out ‘knowledgable’ citizens.

His philosophy toward developing the value-creation potential of students can be summed up as being that each individual has the inherent ability to significantly influence the world (should they decide to) based on the notion of interdependence - between humans and the environment and also humans in their ‘social relations’.

Makiguchi said that the creation of value as the ultimate purpose of human existence, ie a happy and fulfilled life is one in which the ability to discover and create value has been fully realised.

According to traditional Western philosophy, Value is made up of three elements;
Truth, Beauty, and Good.

Makiguchi's theory of value, however challenges the notion of ‘Truth’ as a value.

For Makiguchi, truth is found in the ‘correspondence between an objective reality and the words and concepts applied by humans to that reality.’

In other words, value is ‘relational’.

To illustrate this, think about the a news report of some incident or other. The news report itself is either true or false.

But the truth or otherwise of the said report is independent from the concept of value, ie the value lies in its positive or negative impact on people's lives.

Makiguchi considers truth a matter of ‘qualitative equivalence’.

Value must then be viewed as the 'relational power of the object measured by the quantitative response of the subject'.

So value is derived from the interaction between humans and their environment. It’s relational.

So Makiguchi proposed a different three elements of value.

'Beauty' (or it’s opposite, Ugly?) relating to sensory response.

'Gain' extends and expands the total experience ('loss' is obviously the flipside).

'Good' is the ‘social’ benefit (ie in the same way that gain is to the the individual ('evil' being the b-side of that).

This philosophy of value, therefore, is an invitation to engage with and create beauty, 'gain, and good.

In this way individuals, organisations, networks or brands can create ‘potentially limitless value’.

Yeah?

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add value through content

Waterstone's the booksellers have just about got it spot on with this 'What's Your Story' campaign.

To celebrate the National UK Reading Year they are challenging budding writers to compose a short story and submit it to the Wys site.

The best entries are being published in an online gallery and in stores - alongside a collection of specially commisioned stories written by some top authors.

3 winning stories will be published in a postcard book alonside the 'real' authors including Doris Lessing, Michael Rosen, Nick Hornby, Sebastian Faulks, Lauren Child, Tom Stoppard and Irvine Welsh and of course...
JK Rowling, who has supplied an exclusive 800-word, hand-written prequel to the Harry Potter series.

Value, content, participation, community, partnership, branding.

I've been debating with a few twitter buddies whether the likes of Amazon have the same ability to generate that fuzzy feeling around their brand as the likes of Waterstones.

In the book market I will always prefer to shop with Waterstones if I can rather than Amazon. Why? Because of stuff like this. The cold aggregation of the likes of Amazon doesn't tickle me.
OK there's the long tail and the user reviews, the super fast service etc- but I find something more re-assuring about a brand that actually 'cares' about it's product.
Half of the staff are authors.
And actively working for good in the community - Neil Perkin talks about this here - kind of inspired this post.

Plus they are British...

The campaign and microsite was developed by Manchester digital agency Code Computerlove

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