The next time you work on a major marketing or sales initiative—ask yourself this question: “Is what I’m doing hitting at least some of the consumer values on this list”?  The 12 Consumer Values to Drive Technology-related Product and Service Innovations was created by the Washington, DC-based research and consulting firm Social Technologies. 

This information was designed for technology consumers but it’s equally applicable to YOUR PLANTSCAPING CUSTOMERS.  These values are universal. 

As you read, consider how your plantscaping company can connect and position its products services to these values.  There’s also a PDF of the values chart to download, print and post in your office.  It will come in handy to remind you focus on connecting your company’s solutions to the values of your customer.

User creativity
Customers increasingly want to create, augment, or influence design and content, and share these creations with their peers. Supporting customer creativity will be increasingly important to your business, and will become more mainstream in coming decades. 
How can your business accommodate your customer’s creativity?

Personalization
Customers will increasingly look for products and services that align with their specific corporate needs and preferences—whether in the aesthetics of a product or in its functional design. More goods will be created to match companies’ unique specifications. 
How can you personalize your services for the customer?

Simplicity
Simplicity will have growing value for customers confronted with information overload, time stress, and technological complexity. Simplicity’s influence is already evident in new, stripped-down devices that offer just a few functions, as well as in minimalist interfaces that conceal breathtaking complexity. 
How can you simplify your services for the customer?

Assistance
As customers are bombarded with more tasks, choices, and information, and as demographic changes reshaping their markets, they are looking to assistive services for help. Customers will seek to bolster and extend their natural abilities—with services that help them adjust to changing trends and markets. 
How can you help your customers keep up with change?

Appropriateness
Products and services will need to embrace the principle of appropriateness to ensure that they are suitably designed for users with varying physical needs, resources, cultural characteristics, literacy levels, etc. Appropriateness will aid in the spread of products and services to new markets and to diverse user segments.  How can you make your services more appealing to different types of customers?

Convenience
Already well-established in mature markets, demand for convenience will rise as a technology value for consumers all over the world. Customers will look for products and services that give them what they want and need on demand and that reduce effort and relieve time pressure. 
How can you increase the convenience of your services or of doing business with you?

Connectedness
Connectedness gives customers what they want, when they want it, and will grow exponentially with the expanding global information infrastructure. Customers will look for products and services that seamlessly integrate with this global network. 
Are you connected to your customers with a website, e-mail, FAX, phone, messaging service?

Efficiency
Efficiency is the ratio of output to input—or, put simply, the ability to do more with less. It will become more important to technology as customers search for products and services that let them manage emerging resource uncertainties, rising costs, and other pressures. 
Do your services provide more for less?

Intelligence
Intelligence will be enabled by innovations that increasingly shift information and decision-making burdens from the user to the device or service. The demand for greater intelligence will come in response to factors including complexity, aging, and the desire for personalized experiences. 
Are you keeping up with and providing your customers with the latest and greatest horticultural and design solutions?

Protection
Protection will be sought by customers in a world that feels increasingly insecure. Customers will look for products and services that strengthen their sense of security and protect property, company and privacy. 
Do you have formal policies and procedures in place to protect your customers.?

Health
Consumers will look to technological products and services to maintain and, increasingly, improve their health and wellness. The search for health-enabling solutions will extend beyond traditional health and medical products and services to include more of the things customers use in their everyday lives, whether at home, work, or play (clean air and aesthetics). 
Do you connect a health and wellness factor to your products and services?

Sustainability
Customers will increasingly look for products and services that embrace sustainability—reducing the “human footprint” on the environment while maintaining quality of life. A variety of technologies offer ways to minimize resource use, waste, and pollution while improving human welfare. 
Are you keeping up with clean building standards, and providing eco-conscious products and services for your customers?

So there you have it.  12 critical values that will help you get closer to your customers.  It’s worth doing an audit of your company to determine how well you products and services reflect these values.  For each company your do business with, prioritize their top five values and be sure to refer back to them often in your communications with them.

Using this information is really about effective communication.  You need to clearly explain to your customers (on your website, in brochures, at sales presentations, on the phone) how your company respects on delivers on their values.

Remember, download this 12 Values PDF and put it on your wall.  It will keep you focused and grounded on taking care of your customers.

2006 Barb Helfman’s InnerCircle