Value proposition

A value proposition clarifies your brand's core message.

What is a value proposition?

“A value proposition is a written summary, a promise of the value your customer receives when they purchase your company’s service or product. It gives your customer a reason to choose your solution. The value proposition summarizes your brand’s values and the value it provides to your customers into one clear proposition.” This is how our creative strategist Hanna summarized the value proposition and its significance for marketers in a blog post she wrote.

A value proposition clarifies the benefit that your brand provides to your customers. It is an excellent foundation for many marketing and brand-building activities.

Defining a value proposition is especially important when you want to communicate from a customer-centric perspective. Companies often tend to communicate unintentionally from their perspective, pushing messages about who they are, what they do, and why they are the best at what they do across all their channels.

While self-awareness is important for a brand, what interests the customer the most is the value they or their company will receive when using the services or products: will a certain service save the customer time, or will their life be made easier by a certain product? The value proposition places the customer at the very centre of the attention.

The customer buys your help for their problem, and your goal is to alleviate their pain, to assist. The experience of being helped is the value that the customer receives from you. The value proposition puts that value into words – and thus clarifies your brand’s most important message.

What is the benefit of a value proposition?

The primary goal of a value proposition is to increase customer understanding. Writing out the value proposition clarifies your core message from top to bottom, down to as detailed levels as you desire.

When defining the value proposition, you are defining the upper level of customer communication, from which it is easy to derive service- or product-specific core messages. Thanks to these clarified core messages, your marketing and communication team will always know what message, summary, or wording they need to convey to the customer in any given context. As a result, marketing becomes easier and improves significantly.

In short, the value proposition helps you achieve better precision in your customer messages.

A good value proposition

  • Is not a slogan or a positioning statement for a company.

  • Is created from a customer-oriented perspective, not from the company’s desire to talk about itself.

  • Describes how your company solves the customer’s problems.

  • Describes how your company improves the customer’s current situation.

  • Describes the benefits your customers will receive.

  • Describes why the customer should choose you instead of your competitors.

  • Is easy to understand.

How does the value proposition link to the brand?

Before defining the value proposition, a value proposition story is written to clarify the values of the customer and the brand into one story. The value proposition is a summary of the value proposition story.

The value proposition story is closely related to the brand story, but the brand story is broader and contains more background information about the purpose of the brand’s existence. The brand story tells how and what for the brand was created, and what the brand values are. The purpose of the brand story is to generate interest and trust in the brand.

The value proposition, on the other hand, focuses on the customer’s perspective. The value proposition seeks to answer the question “What does the customer get from us,” while the brand story responses to the question “Why do we exist.”

 

How is the value proposition determined?

Website redesign, launching a new product, relaunching an old product, or annual planning are all marvelous moments to refine the value proposition. Determining the value proposition is a project that takes about 3-5 working days and can be completed in a few weeks.

Determining the value proposition consists of five stages:

  1. First, background research is conducted to determine what value your target audience receives from your service or product. If you do not have research data of your own, we can assist with customer interviews and surveys.
  2. Then, a value proposition workshop is held to articulate the unique selling points of your brand. It is beneficial to have individuals from various departments of the company, including sales, marketing, management, and core functions, participate in the workshop.
  3. Next, the value proposition story is written.
  4. The value proposition is crystallized from the value proposition story. It explains clearly and concisely why the target audience chooses your brand over the competition.
  5. Finally, the value proposition is put into practice. This means ensuring that the value proposition is conveyed to the customer as well.

Why work with Paper Planes on your value proposition?

The implementation of the value proposition is just as important as the process of defining it. We don’t leave you alone to flick through (yet another) lenghty strategy paper, but help in the final implementation. This means figuring out how the new customer-centric marketing communication is translated into copy and visuals in the future.

We have strong expertise in planning and implementing channel-specific implementation of key messages. Our work usually includes making the value proposition visible to the end customer in materials such as advertising, websites, and newsletters – and we also test that the messages work effectively.

In the end, successful implementation is what defines the significance of the value proposition work. And we don’t settle for a job half done.

Get more information or request a quote for defining a value proposition

Ville Pelttari
+358 50 3489 297
ville.pelttari@paperplanes.fi
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