Why a value proposition strategy?
The role of the marketing teams is to support the business meet its goals with a given budget by reaching out to customers. A key piece of this activity is done by understanding the customer needs and providing products that will cover their needs better than any other business is doing.
Having a good product will be essential to support the job of marketing, however, we all know how many products are in the market and how they all look alike. In many cases coms and brand teams have to work harder to develop the messaging and have the ability to communicate a message with the right tone and words that will help build a brand that will differentiate this from the competition.
There are many studies that prove that creative will play a crucial role in making and campaign successful in the short and long term.
To achieve this there are different frameworks that will help you develop a strategy to get to the heart of your customer and convince them that you´ll make them the most happy individuals in the face of the world and buy your product or service.
The value fit framework
There are many frameworks and processes that will help you get there, but essentially, they will all go through a very similar approach:
- Identify your customer: Understand the needs, attitudes and barriers (motivations and frictions or gains and pains). If you can, place this in it´s relevant context. What are the steps the customer is going through in this process. What kind of user is, describe it´s socio-demographic characteristics.
- Develop a product or service that will cover the needs and relieve the pains of your customers.
This will give you the fit and help you find the way you describe and formulate how your product has been built to provide value to your customer.
To do this you’ll probably need to work with a market research agency that specialises in the study of the market and collection of the qualitative insights that will feed this framework.
However, you can always use a simple survey to understand the evolving needs of your customers.
As we were saying at the beginning of this article, in some cases, the products in the market are very similar and it’s hard to differentiate from your competition.
We can work on identifying what is the attitude your customers have towards your product and service and look to break that barrier that is preventing them from using or buying.
The attitude insight change framework
Insights will be the lever that you can use to power your communications, understand what your customers think, feel and do in the market and what is their attitude and behaviour towards your product or service.
Leverage the insight to build your messaging framework, to break that barrier that is preventing your customers to use your product or service.
Use the insights that to provide direction to the creative agency or team about what is the essence of what you´re trying to achieve. They should be in charge of finding the way to connect with your audience using the right message.
Test and learn
You´ve now briefed your creative team and they have produced some digital display assets-
Leverage your media platforms to test and learn the creatives produced. Build a testing backlog where different creative concepts can be tested based on hypothesis formulated from your insights.
Iterate on your testing to acquire new learnings by using test and learn methodology. If you´re looking to learn more about how to set this read how you should plan, set up and assess your tests.
Have you started collecting customer insights? If you are, have you been leveraging these? What kind of insights have proven to be more valuable for you. Let me know in the comments below.
Cristian 360 