| Course | BU 242 Creating Customer Value in the Digital Age |
|---|---|
| Unit | Unit 1 |
| Paper type | Customer value concepts paper |
| Length | About 1,120 words, 7 pages |
| Format | APA 7 student paper |
| School | Herzing University |
| Program | BS in Business Management |
| Updated | September 2026 |
Free sample paper for BU 242 Unit 1
A $349 Air Conditioner That Never Cooled Anything: Customer Value as Benefit Minus Sacrifice, Tested Against One Heat-Wave Purchase
Student Name
Business, Herzing University
BU 242: Creating Customer Value in the Digital Age
Instructor Name
January 21, 2026
A $349 Air Conditioner That Never Cooled Anything: Customer Value as Benefit Minus Sacrifice, Tested Against One Heat-Wave Purchase
Marketing students often begin with a definition of customer value they think they already understand: a good product at a fair price. That definition hides most of what a buyer actually gives up and most of what they actually receive. This paper defines customer value as what one buyer received minus everything it cost them to get it, including money, time, effort and risk, and tests that definition against a single purchase described in detail. The purchase is composite, built for this course from an ordinary situation: a renter in Philadelphia whose only air conditioner failed on a hot Sunday in late June and who bought a replacement the same afternoon. The case will return in each unit of this course. Here it is used to separate value from price and from satisfaction.
Defining Value Before Measuring It
Zeithaml (1988) defined perceived value as the consumer's overall assessment of a product's utility based on perceptions of what is received and what is given. Two features of that definition matter for this paper. First, value is judged by the buyer, not set by the seller, so two buyers can find different value in the same product at the same price. Second, what is given includes more than money. Zeithaml listed time, search costs and psychic costs alongside price, and argued that buyers weigh all of them. Woodruff (1997) added that buyers judge value at several levels at once: the attributes of a product, the consequences of using it and the goals those consequences serve. A buyer does not want an air conditioner for its own sake. They want a cool room so they can sleep.
Sheth et al. (1991) proposed that purchases deliver five kinds of value: functional, social, emotional, epistemic and conditional. Conditional value is the value a product has only in a particular situation. It is central to this case, because a room air conditioner bought during a hot week is worth far more to its buyer that week than the same unit bought in March.
The Purchase
Tasha Morrow, a composite buyer, is 31 and works nights as a laboratory technician at a Philadelphia hospital. She rents the second floor of a rowhouse built before 1940, and she sleeps during the day in a bedroom of about 11 by 13 feet that faces west. On Sunday, June 22, 2025, at about 2 p.m., her ten-year-old window unit stopped blowing cold air. At 2:40 p.m. she searched on her phone, found an 8,000 BTU window air conditioner for $349 at a national home improvement chain called Keystone Home Supply in this paper, and saw that it could be picked up that day at a store about four miles away. She placed the order at 3:05 p.m., received a notice that it was ready at 4:52 p.m., waited 18 minutes at the pickup desk and carried the 58-pound box up her stairs at about 6:10 p.m.
At 6:40 p.m. she discovered that the unit could not be installed. It was designed for a standard double-hung window that opens vertically, and her landlord had replaced the bedroom window with a horizontal slider. She slept that night at her sister's apartment across the city.
Benefit, Broken Into Its Parts
The benefit Tasha expected had four parts. The first was the item itself: a unit able to cool her bedroom. The second was the confidence that it would work, which the product page's specifications and a familiar retailer seemed to provide. The third was time saved, since same-day pickup promised a cool room that night instead of after several days of shipping. The fourth was trouble avoided, the ability to sleep during the day before her next shift. Using the levels Woodruff (1997) describes, the attribute was cooling capacity, the consequence was a cool room and the goal was sleep before work.
The benefit she actually received was much smaller. She received the item, but it could not do its job in her window. She received speed, since the store had the unit ready in under two hours, but speed delivered nothing once the unit did not fit. The unit was also larger than her room required. ENERGY STAR (n.d.) recommends about 5,000 BTU per hour for a room of 100 to 150 square feet, with a 10 percent increase for a very sunny room. Her 143-square-foot bedroom needed roughly 5,500 BTU, not 8,000.
Sacrifice, Broken the Same Way
The sacrifice was also larger than the price tag. The money was $349 plus Philadelphia's 8 percent sales tax, about $377. The time was a little over four hours from the first search to the moment she found the unit would not fit, plus a trip across the city that night. The effort included driving, waiting at the desk and carrying a heavy box up a narrow staircase. The risk, the chance of choosing wrongly, was the sacrifice she did not notice at the time. Nothing on the path she followed asked what kind of window she had, so she carried the full risk of a mismatch without knowing it.
Adding these together shows why value cannot be judged from price alone. A buyer comparing two air conditioners by price would miss almost everything that decided this purchase: the time pressure of a hot week, the effort of pickup and the unasked question about the window.
Value Is Not Satisfaction
At 6:10 p.m., Tasha was satisfied. The order had been easy, the store had been fast and the box was in her apartment. Satisfaction measures how an experience compares with expectations at a point in time. Value, as Zeithaml (1988) defined it, compares everything received with everything given. At 6:40 p.m., her satisfaction with the store's speed had not changed, but the value of the purchase had fallen below zero: she had given $377 and four hours and received nothing she could use. A buyer can be pleased with a process that delivers negative value, and a firm that measures only satisfaction at pickup would record this purchase as a success.
What This Buyer Received, Stated Plainly
Tasha received a fast, convenient transaction and a product she could not use, at a total cost of about $377, four hours of her Sunday and a night away from home. Measured by the definition this paper adopted, the purchase delivered negative customer value, not because the price was high or the unit was poor, but because a single question was never asked. The rest of this course follows the same purchase through segments, paths, pain points and a proposed fix, and the question of the window will return in each of them.
References
ENERGY STAR. (n.d.). Room air conditioners: Sizing guide. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. https://www.energystar.gov/products/room_air_conditioners
Sheth, J. N., Newman, B. I., & Gross, B. L. (1991). Why we buy what we buy: A theory of consumption values. Journal of Business Research, 22(2), 159-170. https://doi.org/10.1016/0148-2963(91)90050-8
Woodruff, R. B. (1997). Customer value: The next source for competitive advantage. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 25(2), 139-153. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02894350
Zeithaml, V. A. (1988). Consumer perceptions of price, quality, and value: A means-end model and synthesis of evidence. Journal of Marketing, 52(3), 2-22. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224298805200302
BU 242 Unit 1 instructions, in plain terms
The Unit 1 instructions ask you to explain what customer value means and apply the concept to a real or realistic purchase. Most versions want a definition from the course reading, a breakdown of the benefits a buyer receives and the costs they bear beyond price, and a short discussion of how value differs from related ideas such as satisfaction or quality. The purchase should be specific enough that each part of the definition can be tested against it. Instructors usually expect three to four pages in APA 7 with at least three sources. Because later BU 242 units often build on the same purchase, choose one you can describe step by step.
Inside the BU 242 Unit 1 example
The sample opens with the definition and the purchase side by side, so every concept is tied to the case from the start. A section on definitions draws on Zeithaml's received versus given model, Woodruff's levels of attributes, consequences and goals, and the five consumption values proposed by Sheth and colleagues, singling out conditional value because the purchase happened in a heat wave. The purchase is then told with times and amounts. Two parallel sections break benefit and sacrifice into parts and compare what was expected with what arrived, using the federal sizing chart as an outside check. A short section shows the buyer satisfied at 6:10 p.m. and holding negative value by 6:40 p.m., and the close states the result in plain numbers.
Reading the BU 242 Unit 1 rubric
In Herzing's rubric for this unit, the largest share of points usually goes to understanding of the value concept, followed by application to the purchase, critical thinking and writing mechanics. Full points on understanding require more than a price and quality definition; the sample earns them by treating time, effort and risk as costs. Application is scored on how closely each part of the definition is tested against the case, which is why benefit and sacrifice each get their own section. Critical thinking rewards papers that show where a common assumption breaks, as the value versus satisfaction section does. Mechanics points cover citation form, heading levels and whether every source cited, the government sizing chart included, appears at the end.
Common BU 242 Unit 1 mistakes, and how to avoid them
The most frequent weakness in Unit 1 is a definition quoted at the start and never used again. Another is treating value as a synonym for low price, which leaves out the time and effort that decided this purchase. Students also choose a purchase too vague to test, such as groceries in general, rather than one transaction with details. Some papers confuse value with satisfaction and conclude a purchase was valuable because the buyer was happy at checkout. Others list benefits without asking whether they were actually delivered. Finally, keep the paper about the buyer's judgment, not the seller's intentions; value exists in what one person received and gave, and the sample holds to that throughout.
Get a BU 242 Unit 1 example written to your instructions
Send the Unit 1 instructions and the rubric posted in your BU 242 classroom, plus the purchase or company your section assigns. We write a custom example that defines value against one transaction, splits benefit and sacrifice into named parts and closes on the point the buyer nearly quit. First custom sample free, back in 24 to 48 hours.
More BU 242 papers and business management samples
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BU 242 Unit 1 questions, answered
Does the purchase have to be my own?
Usually not, though your own is easiest to describe accurately, since you remember the waiting and the second attempt. What the paper needs is a transaction you can set out step by step with dates and amounts attached. A purchase made by somebody in your household works if they will talk it through with you. A composite built from several is fine provided you say it is composite.
How much of the reading should the definitions come from?
As much of it as the instructions name. Markers are comparing your terms against the ones your section was taught, so a definition pulled from a business dictionary can be accurate and still miss the criterion. Cite the course source for each term you use, then spend the remaining words on the purchase itself, which is where the applied credit sits and where most drafts run short.
Is anything from my employer usable here?
Not the internal side of it. Order histories, complaint records, sales reports and anything else that exists because you work there belong to the employer, and a graded paper reaches at least one other reader. Write the paper from the position of an ordinary customer somewhere else, or build the case as a composite and label it that way in the opening paragraph.
Where can I find a free BU 242 Unit 1 sample paper?
The full BU 242 Unit 1 paper is on this page, free, from title page to reference list, with the margin notes intact. If your section wants a different purchase or a specific reading, pass along the prompt and you will get one written on that purchase at no charge, normally inside two days.
Can the BU 242 Unit 1 purchase be composite?
Yes, when the paper says so. The sample builds a composite buyer and retailer for teaching and draws every outside fact, such as the air conditioner sizing chart, from a real source. What matters to instructors is that the definition is tested against a purchase detailed enough to measure.