Developing A Value Proposition from Your Most Valuable Source

Google’s dictionary defines Value Proposition as an innovation, service, or feature intended to make a company or product attractive to customers.

In Jose Palomino’s book, Value Prop, Palomino points out that:

“...A message is nothing without an audience. In fact, the audience largely determines and defines the meaning of the message. In other words, know your audience and how they’re likely to receive and process your message.”

Palomino goes on to say:

“Don’t make the mistake of going to market without a polished message platform… Take the time to understand why the product is valuable to prospects and make a clear case as to why the product is innovative, indispensable and inspirational.”

Beyond just the creation of a powerful value proposition, the full weight of real marketing is found in these quotes, in my opinion, because they go for the throat, the WHY. A company enters a market to sell medium-sized widgets presumably because it knows something about the widget market and has strong indicators that it can take ownership of some acceptable percentage of market share. It succeeds, but beyond the who, what, when and where, does it know why?

If this company takes Palomino’s advice, it will engage in ongoing initiatives to know the target audience better and better to verify that its value proposition is on target, that it knows WHY customers buy. Quality research is key. For any business, surveying clients, customers, donors or members should have the absolute effect of drilling you down to bedrock.

Anyone who has been involved in surveying from a marketing research perspective may be carrying around memories of a difficult, time-consuming and expensive process. The endeavor is a serious one for sure and it does take work. But after gathering lots of data, over what ended up being a pretty long time (4 - 6 months?), for a price that still comes up in certain conversations, there was a question left on the table. Now what? It is likely this question never really got the answer it needed and so what might have been a fairly useful pile of info, never really went past that point.

So data nerds are not enough to complete the process. Handing a stranded driver a jack and lug nut wrench doesn’t necessarily get the tire changed.

Well crafted emotive questions must be created to collect unique data in the form of genuine customer answers. This approach enables human and mathematical analysis and actionable strategy and creativity that meets the data where it really is. In 45 days your company can be in the tactical phase with your most valuable value proposition source.

That means the creation or modification of campaigns built on evidence, then managed and then measured via impressions, conversions, and dollars. Rinse and repeat as necessary. And pick up a copy of Palomino’s Value Prop, you won’t regret it.