Consumer purchase of goods and/or services is the goal of marketing, but isn’t there another critically important value exchange occurring before the purchase ever happens? This is the question facing us as marketing and advertising evolves from a challenge of being in the right place in front of the right people, to a challenge of creating valuable experiences.

The fight for your next customer has been heating up, and your next customer knows it. It’s no longer enough to market to people in relevant media with witty ads and expect them to buy from you when they need a widget or whatnot. Your next customer wants more – they want to be educated about the widget market, they want to hear what other people are saying about your widgets, they want to speak with a customer service rep, they want to see your widgets in action and know that it’s going to do what they need widgets to do.

For a long time we’ve talked about the nexus of persuasion and confidence as the point where someone makes the decision to make a purchase they’ve been considering. The role of building confidence in that process is a new realm for marketers, demanding that they give more to the next customer simply to make them a customer. This exchange of information, entertainment, sampling, guarantees, etc. is necessary to get true purchase consideration in return. That’s the marketing value exchange, no longer trading goods/services for money, but in advance of that, trading something of value for the time and consideration of your (potential) next customer. Some may think of this as giving the ‘milk’ away for free (so why should anyone ‘buy the cow’), but such a proprietary approach is proving to be a detriment in this modern competitive economy.

Product reviews, corporate blogs, customer service forums and support, social media, communities, white papers and unique content are all demonstrations of this effort by many marketers. Google has built a business on it and Chris Anderson wrote a book on it (and gave it away for free). And while support for this value exchange has been growing in the corporate boardroom, the struggle for many companies is their ability to measure such efforts on the same scale as their traditional advertising investments. Accountability in the value exchange, as with most other channels, is the key to evolved marketing.

So what do you think? Is the Marketing Value Exchange worthy of greater focus, or should advertisers stick to the tried and true?