If you really want to create a marketing strategy that will make you noticeable and pop up above the competition you need to deeply understand what is your unique value proposition to your unique audience. And that you can easily do with the value proposition canvas.
Communicating your value proposition to the right audience is critical for the success of the company and therefore many frameworks and methodologies were developed over the years to ease the thinking process.
In this blog post, I’m going to introduce to you the “Value Proposition Canvas” which is a visual thinking mind-map tool that was developed by Dr Alexander Osterwalder as a framework to ensure that there is a fit between the product and the market (product market fit).
That framework can transform your marketing strategies whether you’re a seasoned marketer or just starting out.
Usually, for each product you’ll find yourself creating a few VPCs that fit different target audiences.
Important to mention is that there is no right way or one way to fill this mind map, you can start where ever you like and based on the knowledge you have about the product or the market.
The VPC is composed of 2 essential parts, one focusing on the business and the other on the customer.
Each has 3 distinct components. These components work in harmony to create a comprehensive understanding of your value proposition.
The best practice for this canvas in my opinion is to look back after you fill it and immediately you’ll see things that you can add or get ideas for your marketing needs.
Value map
The first part is the value map.
The value map helps you see the benefits and what pains can your product or service relieves.
The components of the value map are those:
- Product and service-
In this component, you need to write down what your product and service providers in the most shallow way you can describe.
The simplified way of showing it to yourself will help you understand it differently or maybe show you something that was so obvious that you missed it.
- Gain creators-
In this part, you write down all the benefits you think your product can have. Look at each of your previous step (Product and service) to get ideas of how it can benefit based on its basic functionality.
- Pain relievers-
In this component write down the pains that your product can ease on. Get ideas from looking at the previous steps.
Customer Profile
This part of the canvas is focused as you already guessed on the ideal customer profile for your product or service.
The ideal customer profile doesn’t have to be perfect, but clear enough so you can understand some of the customer’s thinking process.
Sometimes it will also help you identify needs the customer has that he doesn’t aware of.
This part is made of 3 components:
- Customers’ “jobs” (By the “Jobs to be done” methodology by Tony Ulwick).
Here you write down what the customer need or wants to achieve. Sometimes is very obvious and sometimes it’s hidden even from the customer himself.
- Customer gain-
Here you write what the gains the customer will get if he uses the product or service.
- Customer pains-
Here you write down what are the pains the customer has in his life that he wants/needs to relieve.
After you finish writing down everything that is the time to see the bigger picture and start crossing information from each component.
Take in mind that the VPC can be very informative with a lot of data or can be very simple and straightforward, it all depends on your marketing needs and how well-established is the idea for you and your team.
