Value Proposition Canvas

Benefits of value propositions

Provide direction

A value proposition can be a visual guide that reminds you of customers' and users' needs and expectations. It ensures that you and the team are focused and have a common goal to work towards. Since the value proposition is supposed to reflect the value of your product, it keeps reminding you about the features the product should have.

Improve marketing efforts

The value proposition can improve your marketing efforts by providing customers with a precise benefit that will satisfy their needs and solve their problems. Additionally, it improves your brand image by planting a concrete gain in users' minds. The value proposition canvas will help you come up with a marketing plan that will appeal to customer needs.

Enhanced customer involvement

The value proposition enables you to clearly see your product's benefits, making it easier to reach out to customers by offering them a tangible value. By highlighting the most crucial features of the product, you can increase customer involvement and improve customer satisfaction.

How to write compelling value propositions?

Conduct research

Market and user research can provide helpful insights into user and customer expectations and needs. Additionally, you can ask marketing specialists and customer service employees for feedback on customer desires. The aim of this research is also to discover the problem users want to solve. These activities will enable you to identify what type of customers you should target.

Align product features with customers' values

Your products and services should match customers' values and solve their problems. That's why you should have a clearly drawn market and customer segments. You must also know your customers' characteristics and their perception of products.

Describe the benefits

You can make a list of all of your products and services and describe their benefits. Their primary benefits should concentrate on customer needs. You also should know why a given benefit should matter to the user. Why it should be important to them?

The value proposition should describe why the offered solution is unique and how it solves the customer's problem differently compared to competing solutions.

Create unique value propositions for buyer personas

Every buyer persona is different and can't be put into just one common group. They have different traits, goals, and problems. Therefore, each value proposition should be adapted to their requirements and expectations.

You should also ensure a product's value aligns with the user's problem. If that's the case, you can start working on elements that will distinguish it and provide a competitive advantage.

Test value propositions

Testing value propositions with potential users will allow you to define the benefits they desire precisely. You can test a few propositions of benefits and see how they resonate with your target audience through research methods such as card sorting.

Value proposition canvas: A model based on dependency

There is a method for finding and designing the value proposition.

All you have to do is find the relationship between:

• Gain Creators and Gains
• Pain Relievers and Pains
• Products & Services and Customer Jobs

It sounds abstract, but it's not. Designing a value proposition involves analyzing particular issues.

What is a product or a digital service?

Products and digital services are more than a collection of functions; they're more than helpful tools used to achieve goals.

These are their basic characteristics, but only from these can the value proposition be derived. A value that allows you to see the difference between product X and Y, service A and B.

Customer jobs: What are the products and services for?

Products and services are created to solve problems and meet needs. Using and performing tasks with their help is supposed to lead to gains. Such as financial, emotional, material, and organizational gains.

Gains that are measurable, quantifiable, and tangible.

Products and services solve problems in different ways: faster, slower, cheaper, more expensive, more efficient, less efficient, safer, or with more risks.

They're a remedy for pains, problems, needs, discomfort, and dreams but can also be a source of pain.

Therefore, customers often buy them or choose others. The value proposition helps them tremendously with it.

Pains or how do we know what gains the product or service provides?

From the analysis of the customer pains that they feel and the reduction that the product or service is supposed to cause, it appears that if the source of pain is the cost, then the product should reduce it.

For example, reduce it by 10%, 20%, etc. This is a concrete gain. Savings.

Savings aren't only a financial benefit but also an emotional one.

It provides a sense of security. It increases the feeling of freedom, which can express itself in the desire to invest.

Gain creators in the value proposition canvas

The value proposition canvas makes you realize there may be more customer gains than you think. You must discover all of them, list them, and arrange them in order, guided by their importance criterion.

Despite appearances, and there are examples and evidence of this, the most obvious ones don't always turn out to be the most effective, especially when they're typical and replicated by competing companies.

Gain creators are about finding the "painkiller" most attractive to a given customer profile.

However, it is best to find several of them to see which is the most effective. "Painkillers" should also be compared to competitive proposals, and you should identify their strengths and weaknesses.

Gain creators are also about focusing on what customers expect and adapting the product's functionalities accordingly.

Value proposition canvas: A model that prevents complacency

Eliminating your expectations for products and services is most important when using the value proposition canvas. They're supposed to help particular groups of customers.

You have to consider the opinion of customers, the specifics of their needs, and their idea of a useful, functional, convenient digital product that offers "something more."

The core of this model is the confrontation of "what you think works for customers" with "what can actually work for customers."

The most popular features used in the design of the value proposition in the VPC model

An effective and A/B-tested value proposition can be found in a few typical features that are particularly sought after, liked, and appreciated by customers:

• Uniqueness — a feature of precursor products and services
• Novelty — a feature indicating either a development (e.g., a new version) or a new need, previously unmet, unconscious
• Effectiveness — refers to the efficiency with which a product or service allows users to perform a task, achieve a goal
• Optimality — shows the level of adaptation to needs and problems
• Individuality — determines the uniqueness of the owner/user
• Rank, status, hierarchy — indicates the social effects of gains (e.g., prestige, opportunity to join a group)
• Identity — indicates the customer's self-esteem and self-awareness

How to create a value proposition canvas?

Create a customer profile

The customer profile should include all the necessary information about your ideal customer and be created for each customer segment. It illustrates customers' needs and desires for your value proposition canvas.

You need to consider the above-mentioned customer job. Define what kind of problem customers try to solve. This will influence the purpose of your service or product.

Next, you should think about the gains and expectations of users. These are the assumptions customers have regarding your products. They have expectations of how and in what way products will satisfy their needs and solve problems.

Identifying pain points is the ultimate step in fleshing out the customer profile. These are issues users and customers encounter when using a product or service. The goal of our product should be to eliminate them or make them less frustrating. They can also spark new benefits or feature ideas.

Create a value map

A value map or a value proposition map is a tool for illustrating the elements of products and services that create value. It helps you prioritize key benefits offered to customers.

A value map is a square divided into three parts consisting of the following elements.

Product and services

This section lists the features and benefits of your product or service and allows you to list all the products and services you plan to offer. You should describe how a product or service will help customers achieve their goals.

Gain creators

Gain creators are about the values products provide to users and customers. In this section of the value map, you should enumerate everything that allows your product to fulfill customer expectations. These are, for example, new features that add value to the customer's life or improve user experience.

During this step, you should ask yourself:

• What results does the customer expect, and does the product fulfill them?
• Does it make the user's life easier?
• Does it offer functionalities that will make customers' goals achievable?
• Does it offer the features the customer expects?

These questions will aid you in determining what the gain creators of your products and services are.

Pain relievers

We've already discussed pain relievers and their primary goal of easing the pain of users and customers. Pain relievers should align with customers' pains; therefore, different pain relievers will correspond to different pains.

The following questions will aid you in this step:

• Do your products improve on the drawbacks of competing products?
• Do your services solve customers' problems?
• Does your product allow users to save time, money, or other resources?
• Does it improve their mood?
• Does the product aid them with day-to-day tasks?

Answering these questions will enable you to define concrete pain relievers.

In summary, creating the value proposition canvas allows you and the team to focus on crucial aspects of products and services. It will help you get a better understanding of your target audience (or help discover it) and make a product or service an ideal answer to their problems.