What Is Customer Perceived Value?

Perceived customer value is a marketing and branding related concept that points out that success of a product or service is largely based on whether customers believe it can satisfy their wants and needs.

[source: Chron] In other words, when a company develops its brand and markets its products, customers ultimately determine how to interpret and react to marketing messages. Companies spend significant time researching the market to get a sense of how customers think and feel.

Use Research to Determine What Customers Value
Marketers deliver advertising messages for different reasons and through various platforms. Market research is critical to understanding how certain types of customers will respond to certain messages. Companies use focus groups, surveys, test markets, and other research tools to get a sense of what customers want and don’t want from products in a given industry. Knowing what customers think and want gives you a better ability to influence them with your messages.

Deliver the Appropriate Marketing Message
To influence value perceptions, companies try to deliver messages that research indicates should create the desired sense of value with customers. Some companies make low costs a priority. This is a simple message strategy as it only requires regular communication of low-cost benefits and delivery on that commitment. Others express messages such as best quality, best service, unique features or environmentally friendly. To influence the customer value perception, marketing messages must be consistent and delivered to the right platform.

Challenges of Influencing Value Perception
One of the primary challenges of instilling a value perception in customers is making sure that your product or service stands out when compared to the product or service of your main competitors. And when companies do not use market research, or when their market research is inaccurate, they run the risk of making false assumptions on what messages will affect customer value perception.

To better understand customer perceived value, you need to know about value proposition. A value proposition is a comparison of the benefits offered by a company’s products and services to the price it asks customers to pay. Companies can generally influence the value proposition in one of two ways. They can use long-term brand building advertising to emphasize key traits and characteristics of the brand and products. Business owners can also offer a relatively low cost to enhance value. Ultimately, the key is that customers perceive that the product’s merits more than justifies its price.