The story of the POW camp proves one thing: value begins with exchange, and exchange begins with subjective judgment. A jar of jam was worth seven cigarettes — not because of what it cost to make. The Red Cross had given it away for free.
The camp
During the Second World War, a British officer named R. A. Radford was captured and held in a German prisoner-of-war camp.
Everyone received roughly the same rations — the same food, the same clothes, the same cigarettes. Within days, people noticed something. "I don't smoke. Give me your cigarettes, take my chocolate," and both men were better off than before. Trade had started.
Barter stopped being enough almost immediately. Cigarettes became money. A jar of jam was worth seven cigarettes; a cup of coffee, two. Some prisoners hoarded goods and waited for prices to rise. Some became middlemen and lived on the spread. One opened a coffee stall, hired someone to boil the water, and kept a set of books. Prices moved with supply: when Red Cross parcels arrived, cigarettes were plentiful and prices rose; when the parcels ran out, prices fell. Poorly hand-rolled cigarettes drove good ones out of circulation — Gresham's law, working in a prison yard.
Radford later published the story in the journal Economica: "The Economic Organisation of a P.O.W. Camp." His point was larger than the camp. Markets grow wherever there are people who want to exchange. Nobody designed this one. It grew because of what people carry in their heads.
What economics says: cost is what you give up
That jar of jam was not worth seven cigarettes because of its production cost — there was no production; it was charity. Its price came from two subjective judgments: to the man who didn't smoke, the jam was worth seven cigarettes; to the man who craved them, seven cigarettes were worth the jam.
Mises put it most sharply: all human action is exchange — trading a state you are dissatisfied with for one you prefer. When you buy a two-yuan breakfast bun, you are not "satisfying a demand." That is the economist's abstraction, not what happens in your head. You are choosing: pay two yuan, give up everything else those two yuan could have bought — a fried dough stick, a cup of soy milk, both together — in exchange for something warm, familiar, and solid.
Cost is not the price tag. Cost is the next-best thing you gave up. If you chose the bun, the real cost is the dough stick you didn't eat. If, in your heart, the dough stick was better — you lost. If the bun was better — you won. Cost lives in the mind, not in the ledger.
What psychology says: you are not buying things; you are declaring who you are
When functional value stops separating products — the cigarettes in the camp were all the same tobacco; in the market, features converge — what you buy becomes a declaration of who you are. The car you drive, the brand you wear, the phone in your hand, the drink you order: each one says "I am this kind of person" to the world. That is not vanity. It is how identity gets built.
Cai Yu, in a popular Chinese business course on emotional value, proposes a formula: product value = functional value + emotional value + asset value.
Functional value is no longer scarce. China runs the world's most complete industrial system, and its supply chains are open to everyone. Compete on function and you end up competing on price, at margins that barely cover the effort. Asset value exists — collectibles, resale — but it cannot be manufactured on demand. That leaves emotional value: what a customer will pay to feel something.
Why would a prisoner trade two days of bread rations for a cup of hot coffee? Not because of cost — both came free in the parcels. Because the coffee smelled like before the war. Because, for ten minutes, he was a person again.
What philosophy says: the useful enters the pocket; the useless enters the heart
Zhuangzi tells a story in "In the Human World." A carpenter travels to the state of Qi and sees an enormous oak tree, crowded with onlookers. He does not so much as turn his head. His apprentice asks why. The carpenter answers:
"Build a boat from it and it would sink. Make it a coffin and it would rot in no time. Make it a vessel and it would break. Make it a door and it would leak sap. Make it a pillar and it would be riddled with worms. A tree of no use at all — that is why it has lived this long."
Consumption works the same way. Purely useful things enter your pocket and never your heart. Something more useful arrives tomorrow, and you replace them. But the "useless" things — a bronze mask from Sanxingdui on the shelf, a bottle of wine from forty-year-old vines, a panda sticker from the city zoo — you keep them. Not because they are useful. Because they say something on your behalf.
(Purists will note that the famous phrase "the use of the useless is the greatest use" is not Zhuangzi's wording. The text reads: "Everyone knows the use of the useful, but no one knows the use of the useless." The idea is faithful; the slogan came later. Zhuangzi would not have minded.)
Emotional value is the modern business name for the use of the useless.
Where the three lines meet
Economics, psychology, philosophy — three different doors into the same room: turn a cultural symbol into a brand's own asset.
One premise before the five chapters. The "symbol" in this book is not a logo. It is the product itself. The twelve emblems on the Palace Museum's Year of the Dragon porcelain are not printed on the glaze; they are the form of the vessel. The product is the brand. The symbol is the product.
The five chapters
The chapters stand in a fixed order, like parts of an instrument:
The Psychological Common Denominator is the string — the deep structure of human nature. Find it, and you have found the floor of the business.
Consumer motivation is the finger that plucks it. The string is always there. Only when motivation touches the right nerve does anyone reach for their wallet.
The symbol is what the string looks like. It turns an invisible consensus into something visible — something that can be perceived, remembered, talked about.
The shelf is where the string gets heard. The symbol is right, the motive is sharp — but a hundred other products are competing for the same ear. You still have to win.
The cultural symbol is the song people end up singing. Long enough, shared enough, and your symbol stops belonging to you and starts belonging to the culture.
Run the five together and you have a complete route: from the floor of the human mind to a symbol that belongs to the culture.
A blunt note
Some people think branding means making a loud symbol and repeating it until everyone remembers.
I think branding means making a precise product that catches a string already strung inside people. The string was always there. You don't have to shout. You have to pluck.
Most brand books start from "how do we get remembered." This one starts from "how do we get plucked." Different starting points, different destinations.
Find the common denominator in people's minds. Build it into the product. That is branding.
Notes
- R. A. Radford, "The Economic Organisation of a P.O.W. Camp," Economica, New Series, Vol. 12, No. 48 (Nov. 1945), pp. 189–201.
- Unnamed commercial cases in this book come from the author's project research or industry observation, anonymized at the request of the brands concerned or under NDA.
- "Psychological Common Denominator" differs from Jung's "collective unconscious": the latter is an academic concept describing what humans share; the former is a working concept proposed for commercial contexts — something that can be located, activated, and utilized.
- On the historical record of Moutai's Panama award, see The Cultural History of Moutai (Kweichow Moutai Group, 2022) and Hu Xiaoyun, "A Communication Analysis of the Moutai Smashed-Jar Legend," Brand Research, no. 4 (2020).