Leave it to the French.
President Sarkozy, a man married to a super-model, decided that a measure of a nation's worth shouldn't be measured in just GDP (gross domestic product) and should have other 'softer measures' to gauge the true value of the community and country. He embarked on this mission a few months ago when he hired former White House advisor and economist Joseph Stiglitz to create these measures. Mr Stiglitz calls this new measure, Gross National Happiness.
Surely with France emerging from the recession, like the US, unemployment is still high and much of the country's wealth has been diminished. So while the GDP figures will look better, people are working harder than ever, spending more time away from their families, taking less 'holidays' and generally doing less of what makes them happy. Now, this is in a country where short work weeks, strict labor laws and long holidays are the norm. Imagine what our Gross National Happiness would be in the US? Holy crap, we'd be depressed if we have a true economic measure that aligned and tracked with our GDP.
But I digress. The real purpose of this post is to learn from this softer measure in measuring the true value of an entity whether a country or a company. We've talked a lot about the relatively new metric of 'sentiment' as the social media and listening tools allow us to get real-time feedback into the community's feelings about a brand, organization or product. Convincing CEO's that they should be concerned with sentiment along with their revenue and gross margin figures is difficult, for sure. Maybe the stud, Sarkozy's move will be a bellwether for us as we try to straight-line people's feelings about a brand to sales and the capitalized value of an organization. This isn't the first time that the bean counters and auditors have tried to value something that isn't tangible, think about the goodwill line item on a companies value statement. The notion of what is the brand worth to the price point and value of the company.
I suspect that we will have to get in touch with our feelings a little more and determine how sentiment, happiness and well-being plays into how we value our own organizations, our lives and how we create value for our clients.
Wirestone is uniquely ranked on both Top 50 lists for Advertising Age's Integrated Marketing and Interactive Agencies. We're also in the top 2% of marketing services agencies in the United States ranked by billings. 
