How to stand out from your competition - the value curve effect
Most - if not all businesses have their sights set on scaling quickly in their early days. For many businesses looking to scale, it can be overwhelming trying to establish your voice in a sea of many.
Identifying a clear unmet need of your target market for your start-up makes it so much easier to communicate why people favour your brand over others.
A great way to do this is by using the value curve framework.
Value curve is a simple graph created to help test whether your strategy stands out from alternatives.
Why do you need value curves?
It’s important to work out if your business idea is feasible in your desired market. More importantly, you need to figure out if it appeals to the consumers within it.
To do this, you need to start by answering these questions:
- Who are you building the product for?
- What does it do for them?
By answering these questions, you’ll be able to create new market opportunities by creating new and different value propositions.
Value curves help identify where competitors are heavily investing and how different offerings are positioned to customers. This then allows you to figure out the right market space to provide something unique and relevant to your target audience.
Using a value curve makes it easier to focus on the different factors in your value proposition, making it a lot easier for the right people to understand why you’re the right choice.
How do you plot one?
- Highlight the key attributes that competitors are prioritising to deliver value to their customers. This’ll help establish a standard and point of reference when developing core features in your offering.
- Look for overlap in these attributes between multiple competitors to figure out what the most important customer value offerings are from your industry.
- Plot these competitive factors along the horizontal or x axis on a graph. On the vertical line or y axis, plot out the performance of each competitor against this important competitive factor.
- You can then score the performance of each competitor. This’ll help determine how this benefits their customers, as well as how much they reflect this ‘value’ in their brand and marketing.
And you’re off!
💡 Putting it into action
For one of our clients, a wellbeing-focussed flexible benefits platform, we carried out a value curve to better define their market. A competitive review revealed the key value offerings of both employee wellness platforms and employee benefits platforms.
To help visualise how the different competitive offerings were being positioned to customers, we created a value curve. We plotted customer value drivers on the x axis and offering level on the y axis et volia!
We found the value offerings of employee benefits platforms and employee wellness platforms each converged on a common strategic profile, represented in the value curve below.
Using this value curve we were able to pinpoint where the opportunity was for our client to create value by carving out a unique value offering, using attributes that are relevant to customers, but differentiated from competitors.
By using the value curve analysis, we were able to come up with a winning strategy that gave our client a clear challenger status in both the employee benefits and employee wellbeing markets.
Rather than competing with either employee benefits or employee wellbeing platforms, their stand-out strategic profile made the competition irrelevant by providing something specifically tailored to what’s important to customers, but not available elsewhere.
This is just one of the methods we use when we’re building a go-to-market strategy. Drop me an email if you’d like to know more 👀
