Breaking Glass by Rishi Dean

Summary: Terms like “luxury” and “utility” are used too often describe brands, each carrying positive or negative connotations. Here I present the Quality / Expenditure Matrix to characterize your consumers’ experiences, and to help determine how you can leverage that position to your advantage. E-mail. Tweet.

Inspired by my interest in amateur mixology over summer vacation, I stumbled across an interesting post, while looking for a cucumber gimlet recipe. As an MBA, I’m a big fan of 2×2 matrices, which made me particularly interested in this one…which places her cucumber gimlet recipe in the bottom left corner, indicating a High Quality / High Maintenance experience.

Courtesy of: http://fancytoast.blogspot.com

Looking at Erielle’s matrix, not only led to a great cocktail, but it also got me thinking whether brands could be classified along similar dimensions, based on the consumer experience they provide. Moreover, while a brand aspires to a certain position, what happens when they execute poorly? This gave rise to my version, called Quality / Expenditure matrix of customer experience…perhaps inspired by too many of those cucumber gimlets.

Let’s take a look at it, and some examples of brands that fall into each quadrant.

The Quality / Expenditure Matrix

This matrix looks at the customers’ experience with your brand along two dimensions:
Expenditure
The level of both money or or effort (time, energy, distraction, frequency) the consumer invests in order to engage with the brand.
Quality
The value of the product, or service, either by straight utility, desirability, or the depth of relationship forged between brand and consumer.

Let’s look at each of these quadrants in more detail.
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Last week at Visible Measures, we unveiled a major redesign of our homepage, moving from a standard brochureware site, to showcasing our data first. While it took a lot of hard work by many teams, it’s not the first time we’ve been through this. Having piloted a number of these at VMC, it got me feeling a little nostalgic as I looked back on the numerous incarnations of our homepage, which I’ll share.

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Toronto, Canada is often known as “a world in one city”. This summer an initiative launched that took this statement to the next level: 1loveTO. The logo is a thing of beauty (no bias from this Toronto native), but on first glance, this may remind you of something you’ve seen before:

Aside from the fresh new font, there are two very profound differences between the Toronto logo, on the left, and the New York City logo, on the right. These differences enable the Toronto logo to be a unique statement on its identity, rather than a cheap “knockoff” – these same principles can apply to your brand.

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