The Value Proposition Builder

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Why value propositions matter

Clear marketing messaging is one of the fundamentals you cannot pass go without. But if your product has many features and benefits, or has use cases for many different types of customers, it can be really challenging to nail down how to speak about it in a way that gets people to care.

If you’re spinning your wheels trying to solidify a clear marketing messaging strategy, a value proposition building exercise may be in order.

Value propositions are meant to distill all the innovative ways your product solves a problem into a few clear and punchy phrases, but they’re not a one-to-one swap for marketing copy. Think of value props as a high-level way to organize the benefits of your product, whereas ad, site, or email copy is much more specific.

A good value prop effortlessly communicates two things to a potential customer: “why you [the company]?” and “why me [the customer]?” 

The trick is that you need to have an understanding of who your ideal customers are and how to segment them, so you can speak to what really makes each group tick.

Fletch has a fabulous visual that walks through the value prop building process for B2B SaaS startups, so let’s break it down step by step, and translate it into a process you can use for B2C.

Part 1: Customer profile definition

Identifying and defining your customer profile comes first. You could have two distinct customer profile segments, or you could have many, depending on the complexity of your product. It’s unlikely that you only have one.

Successfully running this value prop exercise requires an understanding of, or at least some educated guesses as to, your main customer profiles, as they’ll all have different needs and drivers.

This portion of the exercise corresponds with the “market segment” row of the Value Proposition Builder visual above. To translate this process for B2C, let’s take a fictional flavored electrolyte powder brand that has two distinct customer segments:

• Fitness junkies

• Average person who wants to make healthier choices

As this brand, you’d start by running through the value props exercise twice — once for each customer segment.

Let’s flesh out an example for the “healthy lifestyle changes” segment. Here are the questions you’ll need to answer:

• What: What are these healthy lifestyle seekers trying to do? Meaning, what problem are they trying to solve?

• How: How are they doing it? Meaning, what are these people doing currently to solve their problem, if they’re not aware of your product?

• Limitation: What limitations exist with their current approach? Meaning, what’s making their ultimate goal harder, less efficient, inconvenient, or too costly to achieve?

• Problem: What problem do these limitations create? Meaning, how do these limitations act as a blocker toward the goal defined in the “What” step?

Here’s how answering this first block of questions might look for the healthier lifestyle choices segment:

Part 2: Product and solution explanation

Once you’ve defined your customer segment and the problem they’re having, in our case, healthier lifestyle seekers who are trying to stay more hydrated, you get to introduce your product as the solution.

This corresponds with with “Product” row of the Value Proposition Builder. At this phase, the questions you need to answer are:

• Capability: What’s my product capable of doing? Meaning, what does my product do such that the the user segment’s limitation is removed?

• Feature: What specific feature of my product removes that limitation?

• Benefit: What’s the ultimate benefit to the customer of this feature?

You may discover there are multiple capabilities, features, or benefits worth mentioning. You’d then go through this exercise two or three times per customer segment, which would give you four to six value props total for two unique customer segments. This is how you unblock that messaging rut!

Here’s an example of how answering this second block of questions might look for our healthier lifestyle segment:

Putting it together

When you combine your customer profile definition with your product and solution explanation, the output is the ability to speak directly to a customer’s unique problems, needs, and desires.

Even if you’re incredibly early in your customer profile definition journey, I’d challenge you to segment out at least two distinct customer segments and run through this exercise. You’ll find unique ways of speaking to each segment, and demonstrate a true understanding of your customer, which is meaningfully more effective than trying to talk to all prospects with the same generic messaging.

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