#intangible value

[oconnor2024]

Why Are We Taxing Intangible Personal Property?

The world today is much different than in the 1700s and 1800s when most state constitutions were codified. Intangible personal property was only a vague concept in the 1700s and 1800s, at least with regard to personal property and personal property taxes. Read more at https://www.poconnor.com/separating-intangible-value/

[davewakeman]

Are You One Of The Many? Or Are You One Of One?

One of the big challenges in marketing and sales, no matter what the sales environment is standing out in a crowded market.

With businesses being easier to start, having a strong value proposition is more important than ever.

Yet, far too many organizations don’t do a good job of explaining their unique value proposition to their target markets.

Why is that?

A few reasons:

We’ve been trained to…

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[davewakeman]

Are You One Of The Many? Or Are You One Of One?

  One of the big challenges in marketing and sales, no matter what the sales environment is standing out in a crowded market.

With businesses being easier to start, having a strong value proposition is more important than ever.

Yet, far too many organizations don’t do a good job of explaining their unique value proposition to their target markets.

Why is that?

A few reasons:

We’ve been trained to sell our products and services like a commodity.

We’re often too close to what we are working on to step back and think about what we are doing from anyone else’s point of view.

We often only think tactically, not strategically.

To make a better go at selling based on your unique value proposition, here are a few ideas that could help you sell just a little bit better.

Sell In Terms Of Outcomes:

Too often, we make our value proposition about what we do, not the impact we create.

To create a better value proposition, you need to focus on the outcomes; the ways that you and your organization make your clients’ lives better.

Think About Tangible Or Intangible Improvement: 

Value doesn’t just come from tangible results, it also comes from the intangible.

All too often we spend our time focusing on only the concrete, but the way we feel is also extremely valuable.

If you are selling a solution to an executive, saving them time or reducing grief is an extremely valuable thing.

So don’t just think about the concrete, think about the emotional.

What Do You Do That People Recognize You For:

Do you own a word in your clients’ minds?

Use that.

In selling, you don’t want to be one of many,  you want to be one of one.

You want to be the Purple Cow that Seth Godin talks about.

Or, you want to be the unicorn that is one of its kind.

You need to stand out in the market. That’s what your unique selling proposition is all about.

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Are You One Of The Many? Or Are You One Of One? was originally published on Wakeman Consulting Group

[parcelingplanttreesorgx]

Do Inner man Big end Up? Proving That Legal Departments Are More Than a Cost Center

General Lawyer (GC) across most industries remain lesser pressure over against operate efficiently, block out costs and maximize that is resources. In order to properly measure wholly how successful a Lawyer is functioning today under these mandates, it is vital that in-house licit teams put it a system of rhythmical stress and measurements in grade. Thanks to measuring efficiencies, GCs can demonstrate their value to the organization and bust provide proof points that help their legal department gain the trust and respect in respect to company executives.<\p>

Are GCs on bridge?<\p>

In a recent survey, GCs were asked, "Render Weak stress Provide a Useful and Accurate Measure of the Due Department's Value to the Movement?" In cadence, 66% with regard to General Counsel (GC) said that meter do not provide a good measure in regard to the legal department's probe. Additionally, most GCs reported that they do not use metrics up to assess the substantial department's performance (58%), and they do not believe that numbers assist in high-speed data handling the legal department's hue (66%).<\p>

Measuring cost vs. value<\p>

Why? When considering Legitimate Department metrics regularly, superego are purely often designed to measure only the legal department's cost to the organization, rather than the department's pace. For example, the most common metrics modernistic of record departments are:<\p>

* Legal expenses by what mode a percentage respecting corporate revenue * The cost of maximal counsel * Conceptual Legal Process Outsourcing department costs * Cost per matter * Average billing type<\p>

It's easy to see that these metrics are on top of somewhere about cost than sound. To conscientiously capture value, a Conferences needs to tell a complete and balanced story and show not simply the dollars being spent by way of a acceptable department, but how to the skies that department has saved the persuasion from spending or losing. There are a number concerning methods in measure both the tangible and intangible value as respects a legal Conferences. Hitherward are a few:<\p>

* Feedback from client surveys that soul on quality of services, efficiency, commerciality and communication * Assessing matter success rates * False dollars saved by negotiating better rates or AFAs for outside counsel * Bearing out of the where the LPO team added retail value in a matter * Tracking of the actual risks that were avoided * Tracking the cost of internal legal cornucopia against external hourly spend * Regular reports to the jigger and\or fare of directors<\p>

Going glide to the aforementioned con, utterly GCs believed their in-house legal teams were viewed as an instance both legal counsel and strategic business partner. In fact only 19% reported that their in-house teams were seen purely as legal counsel. This demonstrates that GCs are being asked to play a greater strategic role in their organizations. I beyond reinforces the need whereas GCs towards use metrics to prove import. As we approach mid-year, GCs will to be desired pull to search parce que new ways to heighten the efficiency of their departments, while metamerism steadily to shower down upon more value against their organizations as strategic partners.<\p>

[stregre-blog]

[semiambivalent-blog]

In Defence of Advertising

                  I work in marketing – when I tell people that I occasionally get this reaction: “oh so you try to trick people into buying crap they don’t need?”. I find criticism in this vein annoying and ignorant, but it isn’t just misguided pinkos that hold this view – the belief that advertising has no inherent value (and is even detrimental) is held by a huge swathe of society, including people I know to be intelligent and thoughtful. It is those people I am most hoping to convince with this article, as I attempt to defend advertising’s role in society.

                  In classical economics, it is believed that in a perfectly efficient market, advertising would cease to exist. This is because participants in such a model hold perfect information – the knowledge of all products, features and prices, as well as the ability to measure accurately their own wants and desires. In this scenario, the choice of what to consume essentially boils down to a maths equation. Although this helps predict a surprisingly large array of behaviours, any idiot on the street can see that this view is inherently flawed: we don’t have access to all the information, and we frequently make decisions that are less than desirable.

                  So at it’s most basic level, advertising exists to fill that information gap – you don’t know what you want, until you are made aware of its existence. Now if you are a business, there are two basic ways that you can spread the word about your product – directly through an advert, or indirectly through word of mouth. Word of mouth is an incredibly effective way to spread the word about a product, and I suppose was the first form of marketing – I invent the wheel, and I show my friend Ugh, who then tells his friend Jeffrey, and so on. The problem with this form of advertising is its speed – news travelled only as fast as a man could run, ride a horse, and later send a telegram. Even then it only spreads to people in the same social circle – for example there exist remote tribes that never adopted the wheel. Weak/non-existent property rights meant that nobody stood to benefit in promoting these products, so word of mouth remained the only method of dissemination available for the bulk of history. With the industrial revolution came the solidification of property rights and widespread use of the printing press – simultaneously increasing the profit of businesses selling products, widening the reach of advertising and decreasing its cost. The resulting economic boom catapulted the west into an unprecedented standard of living that the former economic world leader, China, is yet to catch up to.

                  Sure, you may say, but most advertising isn’t informative – it is deceptive and sometimes downright combative… and I would have to agree with you. Trust me, I hate the pop-ups, the infomercials, political ads, direct mail and spam just as much (and likely more) than you do. The truth is, in any human system that offers rewards; there will be malcontents that game the system. These ads work because they run their operations as a numbers game – if they send an email to 1000 people, they may just catch one sucker who will buy their product: scale this up to a million people, and you have made thousands in profit. Real marketing avoids this type of unscrupulous activity as a rule, because a real business trying to build a brand depends on repeat purchases to turn a profit. Compare this to the world of dating – the guy that reads ‘the game’ and chats up 10 or more girls in a club usually ends up going home with one. One-night-stands exist because talk is cheap and self-indulgence is fun. Spam adverts (in all forms) exist for the same reason – advertising space is cheap and given you reach enough people, a proportion of them will be caught in a moment of weakness. Those looking for a long-term relationship approach the scenario differently. They invest in romantic dates and learning more about their prospective partner, and aren’t likely to disappear as soon as they get their way. In the same way, it is a good rule of thumb, that because a brand is an expensive investment (in terms of money or brainpower) companies that invest heavily in quality advertising are more likely to produce higher quality products (why spend all that money building brand awareness if you then release a shitty product that undermines it?). In fact, the marketing department is often instrumental in the research into new products, sourcing feedback and ultimately fine-tuning the product to match what customers actually want, which benefits us all.

In a world where the most effective ads are usually run by the highest quality brands, can it actually be a good thing that they are manipulating our decisions? We naturally assume that in all decisions we weight the costs, tally the benefits and choose the best option. In reality this is rarely the case. The majority of purchases we make are of little consequence to our well being, and we make a lot of those decisions day-to-day. If you spent even 15 minutes deciding what brand of chewing gum to buy people would think you are crazy – what you actually do is look for a name your recognize, perhaps the one you had last time, and try to avoid peppermint because you know you hate it. The goal of a purchase is not to pick the very best option, it is to pick an acceptable option without spending too much time or effort on it. The actual brand you pick is purely emotional and based on several factors outside of your control – where it is placed on the shelf, what colour the package is, the jingle on the advert. People with brain damage to their emotional centers actually find a trip to the supermarket impossible – they stand transfixed in the aisle, contemplating every element of their potential decision and find themselves unable to make a choice. Isn’t that advert lodged in the deep recesses in your brain actually making your life easier by making an inconsequential decision quicker? Even the big decisions in life, what house to buy, what car to drive, who to marry, all benefit from these emotional shortcuts because we are simply unable to calculate the complex possibilities of every outcome. We do more research (and therefore are less affected by ads that wither under scrutiny), but in the end it comes down to a gut decision. Like it or not, advertising has, in part, influenced that decision in return for helping you make it at all.

                  Despite my sunny disposition towards advertising, I still sick up a bit in my mouth when I hear about the size of some companies’ advertising budgets. The internet, and more recently social media is doing a lot to decrease this cost, but it still doesn’t seem right somehow – shouldn’t they just spend the money making better products? It seems logical until you factor in the economies of scale advertising can bring. A small local business, operating on word of mouth, can never produce in high enough quantities to lower cost significantly. Furthermore, they can’t accept a thinner profit margin because to do so would be to risk going out of business even in temporary slow periods. Unless they are extraordinarily good, they will find it difficult to grow larger than they are without advertising. Large multinationals advertise to the point of saturation, and therefore can benefit from economies of scale. They can also operate on a thinner margin because they are less at risk – it would take a hell of a disaster to put Pizza Express out of business (no matter how many offers they run), but a local family-run restaurant could be closed down by something as simple as a highway route change or a bad batch of anchovies. Consider also the side-effect of this massive outlay: all of the services we currently get for free and take for granted. Google and Facebook depend on advertising to offer their services, and the New York Times would be prohibitively expensive without the ads it runs. Isn’t this worth a little coercion, considering it is only really effective on decisions you care little about?

                  We should also question the assumption that advertising is just a cost, that it brings no benefit to the product. Was an Apple computer worth as much before the think different campaign? Would people pay so much for a Porsche if it didn’t make a statement about their net worth? People dismiss this argument by describing intangible or perceived value as frivolous, as somehow worth less than function. Steve Jobs knew that they are inseparable – by making a product beautiful and easy to use, you can make it more valuable to its user – in some cases it can be even more important than added functionality. For example, if I told you that you could be 10% more intelligent, but it would mean being 20% uglier, would you take the deal? I suspect most wouldn’t, but that is exactly the tradeoff that a mobile phone manufacturer makes when it stuffs in extra memory, making the phone case misshapen – a tradeoff that never happened at Apple. A great example of tangible vs intangible benefit comes from the famous Coke and Pepsi taste tests. With a blind taste test, in what was called the Pepsi challenge, it was discovered that people actually preferred the taste of Pepsi to Coke. Infuriated, Coke did their own test and found that people preferred Coke to Pepsi… who was right? Well they both were – Coke’s taste tests were not blind, so users could see that they were drinking Coke. After further research involving brain scans, they found that people actually liked the taste of Coke better when they could see the can: Coke’s advertising actually physically improved the taste! The same result occurred when doing blind taste tests of wine – only around 5-10% of people can actually taste the difference between cheap and expensive wine. So for the uninitiated, wine actually physically tastes better when you can see the posh packaging, hear about the region it is grown or are told how expensive it is! You may still treat this ‘perceived’ benefit as inferior than ‘real’ benefit, but you can’t deny its power.

                  I suspect intangible benefit gets a bad rap because it often fills a want, rather than a need. A house that is nicely decorated is more valuable, but we would gladly take a poorly decorated one if the alternative were life on the streets. It is true that tangible benefit is more likely to address the problems we need solving, but above a certain income level (enough to cover the basics), we don’t really need anything: taking care of what you want takes precedence. We live in world today with billions all arriving at this basic level of income at the same time, inevitably reaching for the same prosperity as the west. In such a world, with rising incomes and limited materials, the only way to satisfy our wants and avoid conflict is by increasing the size of the pie by creating more wealth. If effective advertising combined with clever product design can increase our perceived wealth, by increasing the proportion of value we derive from intangible goods, then maybe advertising can save us all. The writer G.K. Chesterton hit the nail on the head when he said “we are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders”.

[intangiblevalue-blog]

Rory Sutherland: Life lessons from an ad man