Digitization requires new value proposals

Digitalization means that most businesses need to develop new, adjusted value proposals for the market. As always, it's a good rule to think less of what you sell and more about how you can appear relevant and valuable when the customer is going to perform their most important jobs. These jobs are often about managing household finances and keeping time pressure at bay. For businesses, this is typically about increasing revenue or lowering costs. This is where competition will be strongest. The winners will be those who manage to develop services that address these challenges.

Being 'digital' is about rethinking what you do and how you do it, and rethinking processes and business models using digital technologies that combine the physical and virtual worlds. Digitalization is not so much a technology as a mindset.

Digitalization also transfers more power to the customer, who will also perform in brand new channels, expect more and order in new ways. In addition, you meet new competitors and all this simply means that you have to change the way you are used to thinking. Both management and employees, as well as skills, culture and technology must play off one another, based on the possibilities digitization provides and the requirements for innovation it represents.

The questions you must ask yourselves
• Do we understand the changes facing us?
• Who could pose a threat to us? How can we monitor them?
• Is anyone trying to take our place in the value chain?
• How can we challenge other players in our or another value chain?

What has to be done?
By constantly showing the willingness to improve the customer experience, you simultaneously explore how to remove customer discomfort as well as discover how to surprise customers with new services today. This is the best guarantee to steer towards significant improvements for the customer’s experience tomorrow. When you look at what you offer and business models with new eyes, you are also preparing to create new products and services at the same time, often by utilizing new data and thorough analyses.

"As always, it's a good rule to think less of what you sell and more about how you can appear relevant and valuable when the customer is going to perform their most important jobs."

Do you dare to have people form an opinion about you?
Differentiation leaves behind clear footprints amongst individual archetypes/personas. All irresistible brands have such footprints. They offer precisely what their target groups are looking for. This means that they deliver on three levels of conscious and sub-conscious user needs: the functional, social and emotional. This is also most certainly true in a B2B market.

When a brand makes a strong and natural connection across these layers, it is convincing and irresistible because the feelings it creates are reflected both functionally and socially. If you are able to achieve and maintain this, you will gain not only sustainable irresistibility, but also maximum payback on your marketing budgets.

“The reason it seems that price is all your customers care about, is that you haven’t given them anything else to care about.”

Seth Godin, American author and former dot com executive

Offer both painkillers and happy pills
The new value propositions are built around a list of products and services you develop once you have figured out how to relieve a customer's discomfort as well as give them some air under their wings. The often-recommended methodology is "Value Proposition Design"; developed by Alex Osterwalder et al. three years ago.

The customer profile, which can be developed in a workshop, describes a specific customer segment in the business model. The profile looks at what the client wants to achieve and what discomfort she experiences when she tries to perform her 'jobs'. Based on this, you can develop a value chart that ultimately flows into a list of products and services, and, voila, you have a structured description of the content of new value propositions in the business model.

Get in contact with us for a no-obligation conversation about how to facilitate a value proposition workshop for you.