Useful and Valuable

One of the things that stuck with me from reading Braden Kelley’s book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire is something that is rarely mentioned when deciding on an idea to execute, the distinction between useful and valuable.

Usually we have products and services that are useful but not valuable. But then again what’s useful and valuable to you is not the same for me. For example, Evernote is both useful and valuable to me because I can write, save, edit, clip notes and access them from wherever I am. Evernote is a tool for the information obsessed like me. I’m on the fanatic end of their users where I can’t imagine going back to not using Evernote.

On the other hand, an opposite example is Facebook while useful is not really valuable to me. I could care less if Facebook disappears tomorrow. But if Twitter disappeared tomorrow I would feel empty. Twitter is both useful and valuable to me for many reasons.

Like I said, this might not be the same for you.

One size fits all makes it difficult to be both

This is the complexity of creating products or services that aim to satisfy a specific need with a one size fits all approach. Some customers will see your product or service as both useful and valuable while others may just find it useful. This is where it’s our job to help those customers ‘discover’ the usefulness in what we offer either by educating them or by influence through fanatic customers. This is also why word of mouth works, it’s more likely that we like what our friend likes from his ability to show why his new toy is the greatest thing in the world and we might just give it a shot.

Complementary ain’t that bad

Taking the FB and Twitter example, another thing to consider is that while the media likes to put them head to head, they’re both different. And that makes them more valuable. Some of us can imagine life without FB and others without Twitter, but can you imagine life without both?

Both complement each other and that makes them, IMO, more valuable. That’s also why it’s so important to differentiate!

But still it’s not ‘either’ ‘or’, it’s ‘and’

There are certain products and services that will be both useful and valuable to some, but those are very scarce. But that shouldn’t stop us from considering thinking about how useful and valuable it is for the customer when creating a new product or service.

Braden nails it in this short paragraph from the book:

“Often usefulness comes from what a product or service does for you, and value comes from how it does it. If you’re looking to truly deliver innovative products and services into the marketplace, then once you succeed at the designing and developing the ‘what’, don’t forget to also focus on achieving excellence in the ‘how’.”

Bingo!

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Jorge Barba is an Innovation Insurgent and is the Creative Strategist at Blu Maya, a San Diego based Digital Marketing Firm that helps organizations build their online business with strategy development for new products and services. He’s also the author of the innovation blog Game Changer. And lastly, you can follow him on Twitter @jorgebarba.