Products, services and journeys consist of various puzzle pieces that need to be put together. But who puts the pieces together? Your customers or you?
The Value Proposition Canvas is a strategic tool designed to ensure that a product or service is aligned with the market's needs and desires. It helps businesses define their value propositions and ensure they meet customer expectations. The canvas consists of two main sections: the Customer Profile and the Value Map.
This section helps businesses understand their customers by breaking down their characteristics into three components:
- Customer Jobs: The tasks, problems, or needs that customers aim to address in their personal or professional lives.
- Pains: The negative experiences, emotions, or risks that customers encounter before, during, or after getting the job done.
- Gains: The positive outcomes or benefits that customers expect or desire when a job is done successfully.
This section outlines how a product or service creates value for the customers by addressing their jobs, pains, and gains. It consists of:
- Products & Services: The products, services, or features that your business offers to customers.
- Pain Relievers: How your products or services alleviate specific customer pains.
- Gain Creators: How your products or services provide customer gains.
To illustrate the Value Proposition Canvas, let’s consider a meal kit delivery service aimed at busy professionals.
Customer Jobs
- Primary Job: Cook healthy and tasty meals at home.
- Secondary Jobs: Save time on meal planning and grocery shopping, learn new recipes, and enjoy cooking as a hobby.
Pains
- Lack of time to plan meals and shop for groceries.
- Difficulty in finding and following healthy recipes.
- Food waste due to unused ingredients.
- The stress of deciding what to cook every day.
Gains
- Convenience of having pre-portioned ingredients delivered to their door.
- Confidence in cooking healthy meals.
- Enjoying trying new and diverse recipes.
- Reduction of food waste and more efficient use of groceries.
Products & Services
- Weekly delivery of meal kits with pre-portioned ingredients and recipe cards.
- Mobile app for easy ordering and tracking deliveries.
- Customer support for cooking tips and dietary adjustments.
Pain Relievers
- Time-saving: Eliminates the need for grocery shopping and meal planning.
- Ease of use: Step-by-step recipes simplify the cooking process.
- No waste: Pre-portioned ingredients reduce food waste.
- Variety and discovery: Weekly changing menu introduces new recipes.
Gain Creators
- Convenience: Delivery right to the customer’s doorsteps.
- Health and quality: Nutritious, high-quality ingredients.
- Learning and enjoyment: Opportunities to learn new cooking techniques and enjoy cooking as a hobby.
- Satisfaction and confidence: Reliable results every time they cook.
Imagine the Value Proposition Canvas as a puzzle box:
- Customer Profile is the picture on the puzzle box, showing what the completed puzzle should look like. It represents the desired outcome and experiences of the customers.
- Value Map is the puzzle pieces inside the box. These pieces are your products, services, pain relievers, and gain creators that need to fit together perfectly to match the picture on the box.
Your goal as a business is to ensure that all the pieces of the Value Map fit seamlessly into the Customer Profile picture, thereby creating a complete and satisfying experience for your customers.
By using the Value Proposition Canvas, businesses can systematically ensure they are addressing their customers' most critical needs and delivering compelling value, much like assembling a puzzle to reveal a beautiful and coherent picture.
In his article, Strategy for the experience economy, Roger Martin describes how the experience based services create more value for both the customer and the company. Compared to a simple answer that involves the smaller or greater effort from the customer, a solution that is closer to the desired outcome can boost the business potential.
The difference between what people do (effort) and what they really desire for (solution) is the following: people bought quarter-inch drills, because they needed quarter-inch holes. Only a few people needed the drill itself, many of them just wanted the hole in the wall, but they had no other option but to acquire a drill to create the hole on their own. If they could have got the hole without buying and then unnecessarily possessing a drill, they would have been happier.
In the agrarian economy, moms made a birthday cake from what they had around the house, which cost around 1 dollar. During the industrial economy, they paid 2-3 times more for the premixed ingredients that saved some time for them. In the service economy, busy parents spent 10 times more for the ready cakes in the bakery stores. In the experience economy, you can spend even (100 times) more for a birthday party which is fully organised by the service provider and which includes a free birthday cake. If you want a great birthday experience for your child, you can easily outsource the entire journey. You pay more and you also get more service, including saving your precious time.
Taking over the jobs the customer needs to carry out in order to achieve the desired output is what makes the experience economy so valuable. Every task or effort a customer has to make is considered to be an input, which is an opportunity for a service.
Try to take a bigger part in putting the puzzle pieces together instead of your customers, and you will get appreciated more. Do you think you can redefine your offerings so you can get closer to the desired outcome your customers look for?
