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Not All Customer Benefits Are Created Equal

When designing value propositions, one of the principles we encourage teams to embrace is to never fall in love with their first ideas. We encourage them to ask critical questions, challenge their assumptions and explore multiple ways of creating value for customers.

But there's a common mistake teams make after generating all these ideas. They tend to treat every feature, offer and benefit as though they are equally important. The result is Value Proposition Canvases that look more like lists of features and benefits rather than compelling reasons for customers to choose their offer.

Not All Benefits Are Equally Important

The reality is that customers don't value everything equally. Some benefits are the primary reason they choose your offer over alternatives. Others make your offer more attractive and reinforce their decision. And some are simply expected because they have become industry standards.

This doesn't mean that the other benefits are unimportant or don't create value. It simply means that different benefits play different roles in driving customer choice.

Just because something creates value for customers doesn't mean it's the reason they choose you. The primary reason they choose you is what differentiates your value proposition from competitors.

Introducing the Value Stack

At Strategyzer, we have developed a simple tool called the Value Stack to help teams organize and prioritize the benefits they have generated during the value proposition design process. The Value Stack organizes customer benefits into three categories:

1. Primary Value Driver: This is the main reason customers choose your offer over alternatives. This benefit sits at the heart of your value proposition and differentiates you from competitors.
   
   
2. Reinforcing Benefits: Additional benefits that strengthen and amplify your primary value driver. They make your overall offer more compelling without necessarily being the main reason customers choose you.
   
   
3. Table Stakes: Features and benefits that customers simply expect. These are important for remaining competitive because they are industry standard, but they rarely provide meaningful differentiation on their own.

The exercise is quite straightforward. Take the features, benefits and ideas you have generated during the design process and organize them into these three categories.

From A List Of Benefits To A Compelling Value Proposition

Once teams have prioritized their benefits, they can make better decisions about what to emphasize when they communicate their offer to customers. Of course, these priorities are still hypotheses that need to be tested with customers. What teams believe drives customer choice may be different from what actually matters.

Ultimately, designing a compelling value proposition is about understanding the benefits that actually drive customers to choose us.

So join us for our upcoming webinar where will show you how to improve your value propositions using trigger questions based on our value proposition patterns. We will also show you how to prioritize your features and benefits using the Value Stack. You can sign up to join here.

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