Product value in the era of purpose
Most businesses still measure value they deliver by profit. Does the concept of value need to evolve with the onset of purpose-driven business and attention economy?
In most businesses today, the value the company delivers to their customers is still measured by profit. If the profits are good, they are doing well. If the profits are low, they are not. It’s a simple game, easy to understand and scale. It works.
In tech, especially in the last 10 years, another kind of measure started to emerge. The free social media platforms couldn’t measure value directly with profit. The profit came from another source — from the suppliers or advertisers. We started to measure attention. How much time do users stay on our platform? How often do they come back? What do they interact with?
These companies slowly figured out, that if you maximise attention, you can sell that attention to someone else. Instead of playing just one game, that of profit, they play two games. Maximising attention on the one end and maximising profit on the other.
If that sounds a little off balance.. well, it is. Imagine what happens, if we only measure attention and profit? If that’s really the only two things by which we make decisions, how can we ever do anything other than optimise for those two?
