When Price Is Just the Beginning

Room Air Cleaners: Using CVA to Compare Overall Performance for Total Cost of Ownership

The Challenge:

Some purchases aren’t just about the price tag — they’re about what you get over time. In markets where products consume energy, require maintenance, or use costly consumables, the real cost to the customer includes everything it takes to own and operate the product.

That’s where many companies go wrong: they only measure value based on upfront purchase price — not the total cost. But smart customers — and smart companies — know better.

In this case, the CVA team used publicly available Consumer Reports data on room air cleaners to demonstrate how to adapt the CVA framework to model overall performance relative to total cost of ownership.

The CVA Breakthrough:

Consumer Reports had already published detailed evaluations on 7 key factors across multiple air cleaner models:

• Performance Attributes: Smoke removal, dust removal, ease of use, quiet operation
• Cost Elements: Purchase price, annual electricity cost, annual filter replacement cost

The CVA team divided these into:

• Key Benefit Attributes (the “gets”): the positive features and performance
• Cost Attributes (the “gives”): total cost of owning and operating the unit

They created a Value Scorecard that included:

• Customer importance weights for each benefit attribute
• Performance ratings from CR’s expert testing (standardized to a 1–10 scale)
• Detailed cost calculations per year of use

Then, they modeled each product’s position on a Value Landscape of:

Overall Performance (weighted benefits) vs. Total Cost of Ownership
— not just sticker price.

This approach mirrors what many business buyers do when evaluating equipment with lifecycle costs — and it gave a truer picture of real value.

Strategic Moves (Powered by CVA Logic):

1. Transformed Marketing and Sales Messages
   A company with a higher purchase price but lower energy and filter costs could now say:

“We’re not more expensive. We’re smarter. Our total cost is lower — and you’ll breathe better, too.”

2. Guided Product Development Focus
   Teams could now identify:

• Attributes where they lagged in performance (e.g. ease of use or noise)
• Attributes that mattered most to buyers (e.g. smoke removal and energy cost)
• Cost areas where efficiency improvements would make the biggest difference in perceived value

3. Enabled Premium Positioning with Justification
   A premium-priced model that delivered superior performance and lower lifetime costs could now clearly justify a higher initial price — because CVA showed what it was worth to the customer over time.

The Result (in Teaching Terms):

By adapting the CVA framework, companies in cost-sensitive categories learned to:

• Compete on value delivered, not just price offered
• Model how customers think about performance and cost tradeoffs
• Avoid the trap of underselling high-value products just because the sticker price was higher

This Total Cost CVA model is now commonly used in:

• Construction equipment
• HVAC systems
• Medical devices
• Any category where the cost to run the product exceeds the cost to buy it

Why It Worked:

“Customers don’t just ask ‘What’s the price?’ They ask ‘What am I getting — and what will it cost me in the long run?’ CVA helped us answer that in their language.”
— [Product Manager, Consumer Durables Company]

By putting total cost on the same axis as performance, CVA helped companies truly compete where value lives: over time, in real dollars, on real results.