Commerce is all about give and take.

Your brand holds out a bundle of value, people offer their time (as employees) or money (as customers or investors) and your brand takes.

The game, of course, is to ensure your bundle of value is seen as something desirable, and well worth the time or money to be invested.

But what happens when your bundle of value isn’t seen as being especially desirable? Even worse, when people start to question whether it’s worth their investment?

It can happen easily. Your competitors are constantly playing catch up with whatever you do (welcome to the era of ultracompetition). Or perhaps what you do simply is so fundamental (and worthy) that almost any other brand could do it as well (welcome to the world of B2B) or cheaper (welcome to the global economy).

So you can’t get the people you need to work for you, and customers and investors just don’t seem to come your way.

In fact, being meaningfully different is getting harder and harder.

So, how can you increase what you give, and therefore secure, if not increase, your take?

You can try something unexpected, both by your competitors and by the people you need to succeed.

You can change the way people feel, and therefore change the way they feel about your brand.

This is not about making people happy.

It’s about changing how they act, react and interact with your brand for the better.

It’s about giving people reason to feel good about what you do, how you do it and, most important, why you do it.

Seeing – and feeling – the human value of what you do helps people see you differently.

Once you create a new balance between your brand’s “give and take”, you will find yourself struggling with fewer issues, and better fit to realize new opportunities.