On love as a competitive advantage and making profit the right way (after reading Jason Cohen)
Typical advice in business and negotiation is to charge as much as you can. Don’t leave money on the table. Some even say it’s your moral imperative to do so. This never sat well with me. I’ve always valued the long-term relationship over short-term profits.
I always want to leave money on the table!
Reading Willingness-to-pay: Creating permanent competitive advantage for the right reasons by Jason Cohen helped me clarify this value. It helped me see that I care a lot about not just making a profit, but how that profit is made.
1. Not all profit is created equal
There are three variables in play:
- Willingness to Pay (WTP/Value)
- Price
- Cost
They relate like this:
- Profit = Price - Cost
- Customer Surplus = WTP - Price
Rearranged:
- Price = WTP - Customer Surplus
- Profit = (WTP - Customer Surplus) - Cost
So you can grow profit in two ways (aside from lowering cost):
- Increase price -> extract more from the same value
- Increase WTP -> create more value, then share it
The real question isn’t “how high can I price this?” but “how much value am I creating?”
The best businesses deliver $4 of value, charge $2, and it costs them $1 to do it.
Price should stay meaningfully below willingness to pay.
2. Willingness to pay is not neutral
What clicked for me is that how willingness to pay is created matters.
There are three kinds of WTP:
- Love → allyship
Customers root for you. They want you to succeed. They’re happy to pay.
- Utility → fair exchange of value
“This is useful and worth it.” Rational, but emotionally neutral.
- Coercion → adversarial
Customers have no choice. Lock-in, dependency, force. This feels wrong — almost like slavery.
For me, the ordering is clear:
Love > Utility > Coercion
Note: Strong organizations have all three. Ex — Apple
3. Profit done “the right way”
The strategy I like much better:
Create more willingness to pay by creating more value (ideally love and utility, not coercion), then split it with the customer.
This explains why I dislike the phrase “don’t leave money on the table.”
I want to leave money on the table — especially for my clients. I want it to feel like such a deal for them.
4. Love as a competitive advantage
I really love that Jason starts with love.
Love explains why:
- story and mission can beat better features
- people pay more even when cheaper alternatives exist
- some companies win despite obvious weaknesses
Example from the article:
TOMS has weaknesses — people complain about customer service and product quality — but they win anyway on the strength of the individualized story.
Love makes money while bettering the world and making everyone happier.
Personal takeaway
This article gave me language for something I already felt but couldn’t clearly articulate:
A business can make money by emphasis on extracting value, or on creating it. Economically, both work. Strategically and ethically, they are worlds apart.