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A fervent believer in the promise of human powered growth, Russ leads CMG in partnering with companies to help them become aligned, agile, customer-driven enterprises that unleash the potential of their organizations with sustainable improvements in focus, teams, culture, and process our clients.
Mark leads CMG in partnering with Telecom companies to help them increase customers and accelerate revenue. His 25+ years of experience in growth, strategy and execution includes B2C and B2B multi-channel acquisition programs, customer experiences that surprise and delight, pricing that optimizes customer value, and innovative product development.
Blog by Gary Lancina
Bottom Line Up Front: The most compelling value propositions don't just compete on price, they strategically balance three crucial currencies that every customer possesses: money, time, and energy. But here's the key insight: these currencies don't operate in isolation. They're filtered through each customer's emotions and values, which are deeply rooted in their sense of self and social belonging. Understanding this psychological framework unlocks differentiation opportunities that can disrupt even mature markets.
When crafting or refreshing a brand's value proposition, leaders often default to the familiar territory of features, benefits, and competitive pricing. While these elements matter, they miss a fundamental truth about how customers actually make decisions. Every transaction involves an exchange of three precious resources or "currencies"—money, time, and energy. What makes this framework particularly powerful is that we use identical language to describe our relationship with each: we save them, spend them, invest them, and (occasionally) waste them.
But the currencies themselves tell only part of the story.The real insight lies in understanding that customer choices are filtered through emotions and values, which stem from their sense of self and social belonging. A customer's decision isn't just a rational calculation of currency trade-offs. It's an expression of who they are and where they fit in the world.
Consider how naturally we speak about these currencies."I'm saving time by taking the express route." "Don't waste your energy on that project." "It's worth spending a little more to avoid the hassle." This linguistic consistency reflects a deeper truth: customers intuitively understand that they're constantly making trade-offs between these three resources.
The Costco phenomenon illustrates this beautifully.On the surface, customers willingly invest time driving to fewer, more distant warehouse locations and energy navigating bulk purchasing decisions to secure better money value. But dig deeper, and you'll find emotions and values at work. For many, Costco shopping reinforces their identity as a savvy, responsible family provider. The effort invested isn't just about saving money—it also expresses their values of frugality and resourcefulness, connecting with their self-image as someone whose smart decisions benefit their family.
Food delivery services represent the inverse trade-off, but with equally layered motivations. Yes, customers pay premium prices to save time and energy. But the emotional drivers may include reducing stress after a demanding workday, or the value of spending quality time with family rather than cooking. For a busy professional, ordering GrubHub or UberEats might reinforce their identity as someone whose time is valuable and whose priorities are properly addressed.
These same dynamics drive business-to-business decisions, often with even higher stakes. In enterprise environments, the person making purchasing decisions may not directly experience all three currency impacts, but they still filter choices through their professional identity and organizational values. A procurement manager focused on cost savings might be expressing fiscal responsibility and their identity as a guardian of company resources. Conversely, a department head advocating for efficiency-focused investments may be reinforcing their identity as someone who prioritizes team productivity and operational excellence.
The emotional stakes can be particularly high in B2B contexts, where career consequences and professional reputation are on the line. This adds layers of consideration related to standing or belonging,“How might this decision affect my standing with my team, my peers, my leadership?”
CMG recently encountered this dynamic while working with a client in a mature, technically complex category where user satisfaction with major providers runs consistently low. The conventional wisdom suggested competing on price to gain market share. However, our analysis revealed a more nuanced opportunity.
Users in this space weren't primarily frustrated with cost—they were exhausted by the time spent managing system issues and the energy drain of constant problem-solving with vendors who seemed indifferent to their challenges. These folks felt devalued and disrespected by their current providers. Their sense of belonging was to a large group of practitioners resigned to a few suboptimal choices, and they felt their businesses suffered from too-frequent downtime in key systems.
The differentiation opportunity lay in service responsiveness and guaranteed uptime, positioned not just as currency optimization, but as respect for the customer's professional expertise and recognition of their important role within their organization. The value proposition became about restoring confidence and productivity in pursuit of revenue growth.
Customer currency preferences aren't random—they're deeply influenced by values that connect to identity and belonging. A startup founder operating with limited capital but abundant energy might choose the time-intensive, lower-cost solution. This choice, however, also expresses their entrepreneurial values of resourcefulness and self-reliance. An established executive facing competing priorities might gladly pay more for turnkey implementation, reinforcing their identity as someone whose strategic time is the company's most valuable resource.
The emotional context matters enormously. The same customer who comparison-shops for routine purchases might pay premium prices when facing urgent deadlines—not just because circumstances changed, but because the emotional stakes (stress, professional pressure, fear of failure) fundamentally alter their value calculations. Understanding these patterns helps identify when and how to position different currency trade-offs in ways that resonate with the customer's emotional state and identity needs.
Perhaps most intriguingly, currency preferences often reflect and reinforce identity while signaling social belonging. "I'm always looking for a deal" isn't just about money. It can reinforce membership in a community that values frugality and smart shopping. "I'm worth spending a bit more" indicates not just self-esteem but may also signal belonging to a particular social tribe.
These identity markers influence not just individual transactions but long-term brand loyalty. Customers often remain faithful to brands that consistently affirm their self-concept and social positioning, even when better currency trade-offs exist elsewhere.
In B2B contexts, professional identity and organizational belonging play similar roles. Innovation-focused leaders may gravitate toward new solutions that offer potential rewards despite implementation risks, viewing their willingness to try unproven technologies as essential to their professional brand and their belonging within forward-thinking leadership communities. Stewardship-minded executives might prioritize established, reliable solutions, seeing risk management as core to their organizational value and their identity as prudent guardians of company resources.
For established players, understanding currency dynamics can reveal vulnerability points where upstarts might disrupt. Are you optimizing the wrong currency for your target market? Could a competitor succeed by offering a different trade-off balance?
For challengers, currency analysis combined with insights rooted in emotions and values often illuminate differentiation opportunities that transcend price competition. If research revealed that target customers were drowning in time-consuming manual processes, a solution optimized for timesaving might command premium pricing while delivering productivity benefits(and the accruing emotional value) that competitors miss.
For category creators, this integrated framework helps communicate value in ways prospects immediately understand both rationally and emotionally. Rather than explaining complex features, focus on which currencies your solution optimizes and how it supports the customer's professional identity and organizational belonging. “Built for people like me” is one of the most compelling takeaways any potential customer can have after learning of a new product or service.
Successfully leveraging the three crucial currencies requires deep customer understanding that goes beyond surface preferences. Which currency do your target customers value most, and why? What emotions drive their currency trade-offs? How do their professional identities and organizational cultures influence their decision-making?
The answers often surprise. The most powerful value propositions don't just optimize currencies—they honor the customer's identity and support their sense of belonging.
In increasingly competitive markets, the integrated currency framework offers a sophisticated lens for differentiation. Instead of competing solely on features or price, consider how the value proposition affects the complete currency portfolio of customers while honoring their values, addressing their emotions, and enhancing how they feel about themselves.
The answers may reveal opportunities to disrupt the traditional orthodoxy of your category's currency balance and create compelling differentiation that resonates with customers seeking not just better trade-offs, but better alignment with who they are and who they aspire to become.
