How to keep the customer in your Value Proposition

It would be perfectly reasonable for a CEO to wonder what value there is in creating a corporate Value Proposition. I mean, check out this typical effort (verbatim and in full) from a U.S. Fortune 500 company:

“We will supply outstanding service and solutions through dedication and excellence. “

It’s hard to image how anyone inside or outside the company would be inspired to change any action or behavior based on this statement. But that’s what happens when people think of the “value” in Value Proposition as something created within the company that the company can then sell to customers. Some Value Propositions are a bit more specific than the one above, referring to particular technological properties, service innovations or other USP-style carriers of internal “value”. But that doesn’t really help.

The problem with the “what we’re great at” sort of Value Proposition is that it loses sight of the customer, and that turns out to have profound strategic implications. After all, it’s not what people inside an organization think is valuable that drives sales and loyalty. Real value lies with the customer alone and if a business isn’t organized around making life better for customers, then it’s very likely to go astray.

Let’s look at what happens when an organization keeps the customer in its sights. Here’s a Value Proposition from CVS pharmacies in the U.S.:

“We will be the easiest pharmacy retailer for customers to use.”

What a difference. Here is a statement that tells customers exactly what to expect from CVS: convenience and simplicity. Note that the brand promises not simpler and more convenient products or services, but simplicity and convenience in customers’ own lives.

Just as important as what the Value Proposition tells the customer is what it says internally. Even though it refers only to customer experience, the statement serves as a strategic guide for virtually all internal operations. Anyone at CVS developing a new product, designing retail space or training customer representatives can check their actions and results against the Value Proposition by simply asking themselves: does this make using CVS easier for our customers?

 Value Propositions are something of an all-purpose strategic anchor.

The same thing is true for a number of brand and corporate statements besides the Value Proposition:

• mission statement
• brand promise
• statement of corporate purpose

In fact I’d say these terms* are all pretty much the same thing. As long as they keep a proper focus on the customer, they all do a good job describing an organization’s central purpose, its “why we exist”.

Truth is, terminology around brand statements is kind of a mess. Branding professionals can’t even seem to agree on a coherent set of definitions, and it’s easy to get lost in lengthy glossaries of brand terms. But let’s not let semantics get in the way of improving customer focus.

Try this quick self-check: take a good look at your Value Proposition (or mission, promise, purpose or whatever). Is it about how great you are, or how superior your product or service is? If so, scrap it. Is should be about the customer, not you. And no, “supplying our customers with the best products and services” doesn’t qualify either. A customer-focused Value Proposition must spell out how those products and services make life better for your customers. In the CVS example, it’s by making pharmacies easy to use.

Maybe we could apply a semantic band-aid and use the term (as many branding pros already do) “Customer Value Proposition”. That’s not exactly a miracle cure for ailing Value Props, but it would at least be a reminder to keep the focus on the customer instead of ourselves.

* Some would throw Vision Statements into the same pot with the other statements. Not  me. Vision refers to a desired future state, not what the organization is doing at the moment.)