By Joel Magalnick
Creaky bones. Sore muscles. Strange aches and pains. You know how sometimes everything just feels out of alignment? Many of us feel it with our aging bodies. But we might also feel it with our business.
Where do you feel misaligned with your company? Maybe your customers have created expectations based on something you don’t actually offer. Perhaps your team feels at loose ends because the story they’re telling doesn’t quite encapsulate the business. Or the products you sell no longer feel like they fit the market you’ve so carefully cultivated. Whatever it is, something is just, well, off.
Let’s think about
If any of these reasons feels exactly like where you’re stuck, maybe it’s time to reevaluate your value proposition.
- Evolving Customer Needs: One of the primary reasons to re-establish your company’s value proposition is the changing dynamics of customer needs and preferences. Over time, customer expectations, demands, and market trends can shift significantly. By revisiting and redefining your value proposition, your company can align its offerings with the evolving needs of your target customer—you do have a target customer, right?
First steps: Customer evaluation pressure test: This might seem obvious, but ask questions! Even when we have day-to-day interactions with any given client, we’re so busy trying to work on the sale that we forget to ask why they showed up in the first place.
- Increased Competition: Competition in your space is fierce, isn’t it? New players enter the market, your existing competitors continue to innovate (not that you should be spending your time looking over your shoulder), and disruptive technologies emerge seemingly out of nowhere. In such scenarios, you may find that the distinctiveness of your company’s value proposition is becoming overshadowed by what somebody else is offering.
First steps: Category analysis: What the heck’s a category and why do I need to analyze it? Categories can be broad, like restaurant. Categories can be much narrower, like family-style Sicilian pizza parlor. Perhaps there’s one in your town that was first to market and have become known as the go-to place for taking the kids or even a happy hour. Do you fall into a category or have you invented your own?
- Market Saturation: Over time, a market can become saturated with similar products or services, leading to a lack of differentiation and commoditization. When your company’s value proposition becomes less compelling due to market saturation, it becomes critical to revisit what you’re offering.
First steps: Category implementation: Of course you can’t implement a category if you don’t know what your category needs to be. Perhaps that Sicilian pizza restaurant concept started out as just one more Italian restaurant, but the owners, seeing that three other Italian joints down the street were doing a brisk business because the candles in their Chianti bottles were less melted, knew they needed to think much more differently.
- Business Transformation: Companies often undergo significant transformations such as mergers, acquisitions, or diversification into new markets or industries. These changes can — and most likely will — impact your existing value proposition and require a reassessment of your company’s core values so you’re aligned with your new strategic direction, business goals, and target audience.
First steps: Market analysis: This goes much deeper than just figuring out who your competitors are. Dig deep into potential target customers. Figure out your market segments. Ask lots of questions!
- Feedback and Customer Insights: Customer feedback and insights can serve as valuable indicators for the need to re-establish your company’s value proposition. Customer complaints, declining sales, or negative reviews may indicate that the current value proposition is not resonating with the target audience.
First steps: Customer evaluation pressure test: Yes, it all comes back to the customer. Analyzing customer feedback and conducting market research can provide valuable insights into customer perceptions, pain points, and expectations. At the same time, however, customers can only react to what they know. Hopefully that thought gets your creative wheels rolling.
So where do you begin? How do you become the restaurant that everyone wants to go to (figuratively speaking, of course, unless you actually have a restaurant)?
Need a little help getting started with reviewing your value proposition? Value prop is North Then West’s specialty. Give us a call!
