Insights Blog

We regularly help our clients develop value propositions for their brands and products. Simply stated, a value proposition is a promise that articulates why a customer should buy from you. But, as any seasoned marketer will tell you, there’s nothing simple about it.

When businesses take an “if we build it, they will come” approach, products fail. We believe three core concepts must be carefully considered to develop any effective value proposition—regardless of the product or service, the B2B or B2C context, or the type of organization.

In recent weeks, we’ve been writing a lot about customer experience. We’ve addressed ownership of the customer experience within the organization. We’ve discussed how your customer’s digital experience influences their view of your brand. We’ve also touched on the role of metrics in your customer design experience.

Our primary message throughout has been that if you integrate each of your customer’s touch points to reflect your brand, you win. So, let’s talk about a few brands that are doing this brilliantly:

Great brands make every effort to control and provide amazing experiences for their customers. (Need some help here? Check out our recent post on How to Make Your Next Customer’s Experience the Best Yet.) Yet as careful and strategically savvy as they can be, many companies drop the ball when it comes to the digital customer experience.

Can you describe the experience your next customer will receive by engaging with your brand? By taking a look at how customers are involved with, use, and perceive your products in the market, you can begin to understand how your brand accrues value. However, doing this research alone is not enough to make your brand stand apart. What you do with this information and how you act upon it become critical in shaping the interaction for the best possible customer experience .

In the first three posts of this series, we discussed what it takes for a marketing excellence program to have a sustained impact on an organization. It must have various interlocking components, each designed to address different challenges in getting rapid results while delivering long-term change. Those components are: Design, Implementation, Inspiration, and Measurement. Having already addressed Design, Implementation and Inspiration - in this final post of the series - we will discuss the metrics used to evaluate the progress of a marketing excellence program.

As mentioned in the first and second post of this series, if a marketing excellence program is to have sustained impact on an organization, it must have various interlocking components. Each component is designed to address different challenges in getting rapid results while delivering long-term change. These components are: Design, Implementation, Inspiration, and Measurement. We discussed the role of Design and Implementation in the first two posts. In this post, we will focus on Inspiration – inspiring change, unleashing creative energies, and motivating breakthrough thinking in the program.

As mentioned in our first post, if a marketing excellence program is to have a sustained impact on an organization, it must have various interlocking components, each designed to address different challenges in getting rapid results while delivering long-term change. These components are: Design, Implementation, Inspiration, and Measurement. In this the second post, we will focus on Implementation.

Why do so many marketing excellence programs fail to deliver on their goals? Marketing is one of the few levers that companies can use to drive profitability in the short-term and sustained growth in the long-term, yet too many companies approach such programs one-dimensionally - through competency enhancement, marketing accountability, or marketing process development. Joining the flotsam of well-intentioned corporate programs, they get tepid adoption by the business teams who consider most of them a distraction or “extra work.”

When done right, marketing drives growth, which is why so many leading global companies have invested in the creation of marketing excellence programs. So, how does your program stack up? Here are a few questions that will help you assess the maturity of your company’s marketing excellence program.

With year-end approaching, you’ve put together the pieces of your marketing plan and are thinking about how to grow your capabilities in 2014. Have you considered improving your curriculum to better train your marketers? Have no fear - we’ve pulled together some best practices for you.