Let's look at shampoo again. In case you're hair deprived/bald-enabled, think of soap. We can get shampoo from cents/liter to hundreds of dollars/liter (e.g. Bvlgari Green Tea shampoo). Although we may luck-out at the low end and get a product that's really great, in all likelihood we'll get something that's overly-scented, harsh, and abrasive - though we might not care. At the other end of the scale, we'll get something that smells perfect and turns our hair into strands of silky gold velvet chocolate. However, we'll really have to focus on the experience while shampooing and invest a lot of creativity into how this makes us feel like royalty for the product’s valued to be realized. Investing the same focus on less expensive products will have similar results.
If we're going to spend seven hours at a gym every week, we're not always going to get the maximum value by going the cheapest route (think of packed machines or broken equipment). Location and impact on overall health are more important factors in gym selection.
When selecting any non-commodity or personal service/product, we should be thinking up a way of judging categories of product based on our preferences. Once we do come up with a rubric, we should be ruthless in applying it and not be swayed.
For our shampoo example, our preferences might be (in order of importance):
- Smells good (0-4 points)
- Moisturizes (0-3 points)
- Doesn’t contain many chemicals (0-2 points)
- Not tested on animals (0-1 point)
We can then pick the three top-scoring products and order them based on price. We’ll then find the product that will be the best value for us personally.
Of course, it might not be worthwhile to do such a complicated exercise for shampoo. However, coming up and using rating systems is the surest way to get us value.
