Whether one calls it a sales proposition, a value proposition, or a positioning statement every product or service must develop a statement that expresses its reason for being.
If you can’t define what it is about your product or service that differentiates it from the alternatives, can’t express strong enough benefits that will be delivered to the purchaser that they are willing to forego what they are currently doing and pay you worthwhile money to purchase your offering, then you don’t have a commercially viable offering.
Historically when advertising agencies, instead of being merely space salespeople, took on the task of filling the space with advertising, they often found their clients briefing was poor. So it was that marketing as a discipline grew up in the ad agencies, and it was the ad agencies that lead the way in developing the sales/value propositions.
Grey Advertising, the largest agency in New York, with clients like General Foods, Procter & Gamble, and Uncle Bens was one of the leaders with their Brand Character methodology. So I learnt the Grey method, and have used it ever since for whatever product or service I am working on, consumer or B2B, because of its power and simplicity.
It can even be used to pre-test the strength and commercial viability of an idea for a product or service by assuming that it is already fully developed and works.
So why should someone buy what you have developed, or as the Grey Brand Character positioning statement puts it so succinctly:
Why are you believably better?
We use the following format to test the “why”.
| OURS is better than the |
|
| competition i.e. |
what does OURS replace? |
|
| for the target i.e. |
who is going to buy OURS? |
|
| because i.e. |
what benefits does OURS deliver to the target?
what needs does OURS satisfy? |
|
| as a result of i.e. |
the reasons why OURS is better? |
|
Defining the market
Since there are always more needs than there are resources, more hopes than can be matched with reality, and more expectations than can be met, there is always something to be foregone if the NEW is to be purchased (or economics wouldn’t exist).
So to begin markets need to be defined very widely or else we may fail to appreciate the true competition.
Defining the target
Is very rarely everybody, and always much harder to define than it first appears. The aim here is to define the target as narrowly as is possible taking into account psychographic as well as demographic factors as one moves from the widely defined competition to the narrowly defined niche we may want to occupy.
