It’s Time to Think About Your Value Proposition
A discussion on the elements of a value proposition
Every organization should have a unique value proposition. A clear message, underpinned by mission, vision, and values, to convey its offering to the world.
Below are three components to consider when we think of ‘value proposition’:
- Customer personas
- Need(s) analysis
- Challenges
This article will touch on each of these, concluding with ways of thinking for future innovation, for survival.
1. Customer Personas
We cannot think about our existing customers and future customers at the same time, because our ability to think is constrained by working ‘in the business’ as opposed to ‘on the business’. So we need to make the effort and take the time to “think differently” (Steve Jobs).
To achieve this we need to condition our brain to tap into our imagination more frequently. In doing we can create fictional scenarios, personas with characteristics and behaviors of an ideal user.
Customer personas are not real, they’re imagined.
This process can also reveal future product/service iterations. By challenging reality, personas enable us to think about obstacles, gaps or pain-points that consumers may experience in their lives.
Once completed, personas should be recorded, documented and identified by name. As illustrated in this article.
2. Needs analysis
It’s not just our customers' job to tell us what they need or want. We own that function. We need to observe, interview and ask (using research) while cultivating an innovative mindset to deliver the unknown for our customers of tomorrow.
This is extremely important because our competitors are most likely already at work defining, creating and building products and services to satisfy those unmet needs, articulated or not.
The alternative is ending up in the graveyard of business failure.
Identifying personas and consumer needs are a good starting point, but true innovation doesn't end there.
3. Challenges
When using an existing value proposition to ideate and create a new product or service extension, we tend to be in a deductive mode of thinking, as such we tend to produce incremental innovation. In this situation creativity can be limited, business-as-usual (BAU), is deemed sufficient.
Business-as-usual is fast becoming unusual
As machine learning evolves, computers will take the lead to innovate incrementally. Machines will replace and considerably outsmart rational thinking, rational intelligence of leaders and managers.
Patterns hidden across millions of data points means that computers can deduce new ways to deliver value, incremental innovation for customers.
This is already well underway in the digital world.
Challenges are littered with opportunity if we choose to “think differently”.
Thinking
Rational thought is not enough. In fact, it can be a fatal mistake.
The long term risk of relying on the same rational thinking that made an organization more efficient, more profitable in the short to medium term can drive an organization out of business.
Rational thinking is the poisoned chalice of innovation.
Why? because it doesn't facilitate destructive creativity. The type of thinking that leads to radical or revolutionary innovation.
This is where humans will continue to play a significant role.
As the competitive landscape and customer needs evolve, an organization will need to update its value proposition to meet market demands. Not just incrementally. No. Radical and revolutionary thought is what the world needs now.
This requires another way of thinking.
This calls for the ability to detach our thinking from the current order of things to look at the world from a totally different point of view.
As such, a value proposition is dynamic. At least it should be. Reinventing our value proposition requires us to conceive different personas to discover their unarticulated needs at regular intervals.
Final Thought
In light of recent global events, it's important now more than ever to reinvent yourself, your business, before its too late.
When was the last time your business updated its value proposition?
Being realistic doesn't push boundaries. So I invite you to be unrealistic, to think differently and redefine market boundaries. Connect the dots!
