Perception of Value is more important than actual value. Because perceived value is what people actually use when making their buying decisions.
You can have the most valuable product on the market. It can do great things and any hearing aid engineer, hearing scientist, or Audiologist knows it. However the customer may not; and miss out on the value.
As a professional it is important to realize most of your patients, customers, really cannot evaluate the choices available to them.
We realize often people buy their first hearing aids based upon price, and then the next ones based more on the value provided. Most of the time this is because as uneducated consumers they know how to evaluate price, but not the real value of the product to them. Once they have worn hearing aids and become more knowledgeable they will make a different decision.
They are buying perceived value and not actual value.
What is the difference?
Actual Value is the analytical assessment of value.
Perceived Value is what the buyer imagines they are receiving.
Perception of Value is why you dress professionally. In reality you could provide just as accurate an assessment of a person's hearing status while wearing your swim suit. And once the hearing aids leave your office they will work just as well if you fit them dressed professionally, or fit them while dressed in your gardening clothes with dirt on your fingers, grass stains on your shoes, and a trickle of sweat about to drip from your nose. The hearing aids and sound waves don't know the difference.
The less the consumer is actually able to evaluate the product or service the more likely they will be influenced by things that make absolutely no sense to the analytical clinician. Because the clinician is focused on actual value, while the patient is focused on - well it can sometimes be hard to tell. Unless you are paying attention and looking!
This is why really great highly trained clinicians sometimes don't get the business that a less trained less capable clinician may get. And they don't understand why.
It is why often the higher priced instrument sells, when the lower priced one does not. It is all in perception.
Highly trained clinicians often have a hard time remembering that things obvious to them are not to others. And consumers buy based upon what is obvious to them; what they can perceive.
Rick
