The Value Chain of the Values Exchange
On one side of this commercial exchange, customers get products that express their values. Customers also get a sense of satisfaction from supporting the organization that is promoting these values. On the other side of the exchange, the businesses earn enough profit on these value-expressing products that they can sustain themselves. These business serve as proof that the values they promote are important to others.
Values add value to the product.
Products express social values though their features, their functions, their provenance (where they come from and how they are made), and their brand. Companies build values into products by choosing specific features (e.g., pockets for metro cards), by choosing how a product is produced and distributed (e.g., organic cotton, carbon-neutral processing), and by attaching their social values to the products through company branding, product branding and marketing.
In the end, people pay not only for the functionality of the product but also for what the product symbolizes. So as the product moves from producer to seller to buyer to user, the product symbolizes how values are shared from one end of the exchange to the other.
That’s how it’s supposed to work.
A Twist in the Value Chain
Sometimes this value exchange can get out of whack and feel inauthentic. Usually this happens because consumers discover that the company is misleading them — the products being sold or the organization selling them are not connected in any authentic way to the values they are supposed to represent.
However, the value exchange can also get out of whack if the products are simply ineffective at conveying the organization’s and consumers’ desired values. The values themselves may be very popular, but there is no product or service behind the values that represents the values well. That means, too, that there is no real “business” there.
In this situation, the organization is espousing values but not selling enough products able to convey these values. The organization stands for something, but isn’t able to support itself economically.