Do you love your pet kitty Grumpy? (and what it means about how your brain works…)

“Value attribution” is the magic factor or variable or weight that makes your business win or wither. I didn’t make up the phrase, but I really like it.

Value attribution is the act that the mind goes through in assigning some kind of weight to everything we encounter on a daily basis.

We then use this weight in deciding whether we marry Sally or Edna, and whether should live in a two-story condo or a farm with five acres, and whether we drive a BWM or a Ford pickup.

Some people might call it “trust” or “loyalty” or “likeability”, but really, it is all about our brain assigning a high or low number to every human or book or idea we encounter.

Let’s see what that means if we use a 1 to 10 scale…

• Your kitty, Grumpy — we’ll give him a pretty high value attribution, a 10.
• Your English leather sofa — reasonably high value attribution, after all, it is your property, a 7.
• Your neighborhood — you feel some connection to it, so let’s give it a 5.
• The car you passed 20 minutes ago: zero.
• The car you passed 20 minutes ago that was being driven by Bono — ah, value attribution: 8. (Let’s assume you like Bono.)
• The hilarious TV ad you are broadcasting next week — your goal is to have folks assign it a value attribution of anything over zero.

I’ve looked through many phrases to describe how our brains put value on everything in our lives, but the phrase “value attribution” feels most accurate.

When we can find ways to pump up the “value attribution” for our company or our products, we win.

When we do things that deflate our “value attribution”, our company slowly marches toward death.

We’ll talk a lot more about this in the future, I just want to get the concept out into the open.