Does Your Value Proposition Need a Facelift?

A value proposition is a statement that describes why your target audience should spend their money with your brand. Value propositions must be customer-focused and clearly demonstrate your company’s knowledge of, and ability to, address your customer’s pain points. The goal is to attract new customers and excite existing ones. A strong value proposition can make the difference between a customer taking a closer look at you or clicking out of your website.

With all the rapidly moving parts of the marketing research industry these days, it may be worthwhile to take a look at your core and/or individual product value propositions to see if they still hold up. Does your value prop work as hard as it needs to in the current environment? Ask yourself if your existing value proposition:

• Is crystal clear in its message
• Targets the right audience
• Truly differentiates you from your competitors
• Is aligned with the current competitive landscape

Your brand is much more than a logo and a tagline. When a prospective client comes to your website, your value prop should be front and center and present the sum of the experience you offer. The value you promise must correspond with the value you deliver to your customer.

As market researchers, we are accustomed to helping companies build their brands through the gathering of consumer insights. It seems intuitive that we would do the same for ourselves, but similarly to the plumber with a leaky faucet at home, we often do not apply our knowledge to furthering our own brand awareness.

So how do you go about revamping your existing value proposition or creating a new one entirely? We do what we do best – test the market! As the marketplace evolves, so must our value proposition. By testing a few different approaches with your target audience, you can discover what works best before committing to one idea. The success of your marketing strategy may depend on how you go about testing the underlying assumptions of your messaging.

• Ask your audience how they perceive your brand, focusing on your core strength and what you bring to the table that another company in your industry doesn’t.
• Understand the customer experience. Knowing how your various client types experience your brand allows you to prioritize your messaging.
• Brainstorm with your team with representatives from every department. Compile a list of Points of Difference, Points of Parity, and Points of Irrelevance.
  1. Points of Difference – Features that are important to your prospects and not available from your competitors
  2. Points of Parity — Features you offer that are important to the prospects that you also share with your competitors
  3. Points of Irrelevance – Features that may not be of significance and not worth focusing on for your value proposition
• Test your findings.

FPG offers many different tools to conduct simple or more complex testing on your value proposition. Using the Gauge app on any smartphone, different ideas are presented through imagery, text, or video, and users simply tap which concept appeals to them the most. Presenting concepts is not limited to A/B testing – structured and open-ended questions as well as ranking, max/dif, and slider scales are also a possibility. Other testing options include online surveys, in-facility quant labs with an optional qualitative component for more in-depth insights, web usability tests, or tried-and-true focus groups, to name a few.

When combined with data gathered from client surveys and understanding how customers experience your brand, testing adds validity that supersedes mere assumption when it comes to creating a strong value proposition. The learnings from these value proposition tests often generate powerful marketing insights that impact your overall marketing strategy.