My issue with the word "value"

The other day I realised how naive I am, I was in my first class on my marketing course and the teacher was talking about creating value for the customer quite often, in the context that it is the goal of marketing to provide it to the client. But that sounded weird to me, mainly I always understood value as “net-positive impact” on someone’s lives, but in marketing, value is also known as customer-perceived value, and to perceive and to get it is not the same, here was my issue.

I could not understand how a betting and gambling company who takes advantage of a person’s weaknesses, and makes him lose his savings, life, family and friends could be adding value to that person’s life. I argue in class about this and all I got was that if a person is willing to pay for it then it is providing value for him. I just can’t accept to call that “value”, this post is not about that I think that what some companies do is immoral or should be banned, but words are important and shape the way we see the world, and calling value to something that will destroy someone’s life is dangerous, to say the least.

Somewhat similar is my issue with the word “need”, in the same marketing context, it is used to talk about how the costumer has a need which the product is going to fulfil, an example of this would be the iPhone and belongingness, the product is trying to make you feel that it will feel that void. The product is just designed to make you think that it will feel the void, not actually filling it.

Every purchase we make, every decision we take has a positive, neutral or negative net impact on our lives, there is no other option, and there is no way to be certain about the effect of such decision on our life, but we can make some quite good predictions sometimes. Another important issue is the cost of opportunity because maybe your decision is positive in the long run, but maybe the alternative was so much better, this should be taken into account too when we are saying something is valuable. 

People make bad decisions because of many reasons, ignorance, weaknesses (like addiction) or maybe you just bad luck, but I could not feel good about myself if my job was to convince someone that he is making the best possible decision when buying the product I’m trying to sell when I’m sure it is not. An example of this would be to buy a branded cereal for more than double the price than the off-brand still being the same product, that money it is better spent almost anywhere than to pay for billboards and ads, which is what you are actually doing. This is why I love companies that spent almost no money on advertising like Tesla because advertising does not add real “value” to the product. 

I just would like for people to make the best decision for them and their families, to achieve this, people should be aware of the potential impact and cost opportunity. An example of this would be to make a smoker realise how much money is he spending and what he could do with that money, or how that money could grow by investing it. The more data we have the better decisions we will make, and we should try to think about each decision as an investment opportunity and compare it to the other option to try to make our life the best possible life.