If I had three pieces of advice for somebody who was looking at insight and Value proposition creation I would say look out for these three things.
Number one.
Don’t create a Swiss Army knife it’s not successful to make no choices, it’s not successful to come away from a project and say “We created something uniquely complicated uniquely over-engineered so that it literally does everything because we made no choices.”
I would say then “What did you do? What did you contribute?
It isn’t actually success to be lazy and make no hard choices, to just let every feature go through, every benefit goes through and to target everybody. That’s not success, that’s just utter failure!
Narrow the target, narrow the focus come out with something that’s actually dedicated to doing a task and doing it really really well. Don’t over complicate it, keep it focused.
Number two.
Don’t believe that you know why everything is happening. So if you have an observation don’t use your gut and your instinct and say well I’m in marketing or I’m where I am because I just have this fantastic intuition that tells me that the reason that people are behaving in this way is X.
I have run so much market research in which I’ve gone in and thought this is slam dunk, “I understand why people are behaving in the way they’re behaving”. Then regularly I come out going “that was unbelievable”, “If we hadn’t have asked that question we would have fully misunderstood what was happening it and we would have solved the wrong problem!”
Its a problem to believe your own hype, beginning to believe that you are such a guru that you can guess accurately why everybody behaves the way they do. This kind of mentality is the the kind of thing that leads to a fall. Always check your assumptions when it comes to converting customer observations into insights!
Number three
Strive to have a point of differentiation. If you’re going to have a USP in a value proposition often people get to the end and they go, “Do you know what”, “there’s nothing unique about us, there’s nothing discriminated about us, we’re not the first to do it we’re not even better at doing it” “Nonetheless we’ll carry on”
I’d say “why would anyone buy you then? If you yourself cannot explain anything better about what you’ve just done?” . “Yet you think you’re going to go out into the market and somehow the customer is going to choose you!”
Having a discriminator is something where you can’t give up! You’ve got to find something that’s different about you. Don’t accept defeat and say “Our product is generic” If you do, then you’re a ‘Me-Too!’ so anticipate you won’t be successful
