How to Identify Your Brand’s Value Proposition

“Nowadays, people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
— Oscar Wilde

Hovering above all of your product marketing is your brand. Brand is an important entity to consider early on in the process of marketing your product. While you’re head down trying to get a product off the ground, it might seem like a distraction at best (and futile at worst) to try to nail down your branding, but brand is critical from a very early stage.

If you’re planning to build multiple products (or if there is any chance you might) you have to ensure your brand can cover all of them. Building a strong brand will give your users reassurance when they invest in your second, third, and fortieth products. But even if you can’t imagine that far ahead, brand is important to this project from the get-go. It helps you to build momentum and holds everything together as your marketing campaigns ramp up.

The BxP Exercise

We advocate using an exercise called a BxP Value Proposition Map to help you identify your product’s perceived value and how you can market it. You can visualize the exercise by looking at this Venn diagram:

Where brand, user experience, and your actual product features collide, you have a value proposition that becomes the basis of your marketing. It’s the confluence of these three factors — and your ability to excel in producing them — that draws attention to your product, creates a sense of trust or assurance in the consumer perception of its worth, and, ultimately, converts customers into brand advocates.

Let’s break it down.

Brand: Why people want to use your product

Within the BxP formula, brand is arguably the most important factor. It’s the reason people want to use your product. Even more than the user experience or the features of the product itself, brand is the factor in your product’s value proposition that sells.

The reason we consider it the first part of the BxP equation is quite simple: When it comes down to it, brand is the number-one indicator of value for a customer. Apple may have a legendary product with the iPhone, but we’d argue that the actual product is less persuasive to buyers than the Apple brand. They may have some pretty incredible products, but at some point, brands like Apple, Tesla, and Whole Foods started selling solely based on the value of their names. Today, people flock to buy Apple products without knowing much about them. If it’s new, and it’s from Apple, we want it. Obviously, though, brands like Apple are built over time; they didn’t come out the gate beloved by mankind.

Brands are often built over time. A lot of the digital brands you recognize today took years to get to this point and burned up lots of seed money before they entered mainstream awareness. Even Apple was once a niche brand. Still, if you want to become the next Apple, Tesla, or Whole Foods — or even just an app that’s a household name — you need to factor brand goals into everything you do early on.

Users develop emotional connections to brands that far supersede any alliance to features, yet “brand” is not something most entrepreneurs focus their efforts on when they’re head-down creating the actual product. That’s a mistake. Brand is important to think about from the very beginning, and it’s certainly crucial if you’re angling to get VC investment.

If you’re developing a product no one has ever heard of before, you’re automatically at a disadvantage when competing against well-known brands. People tend to choose brands they know to solve their problems. If they trust Tide laundry detergent, and Tide comes out with an ecofriendly detergent, they’ll buy that over a startup brand they’ve never heard of. This actually happened by the way. In 2016, Tide announced their new eco-friendly detergent, Tide purclean™.

People always over-value a product they currently like. You have to work extra hard, as a new brand, to convince people of your value. This does not mean you have to drop everything to go throw tons of money at branding. For now, it just means you have to work your vision for your brand into your value statement. (Our second book, Got Users? How to Persuade People to Not Just Buy But Love Your Product, due at the end of this year, will go deeply into detail about branding.)

Your brand is something you’ll build concurrently with your product, so by the time you get around to creating a pitch deck, you’ll perhaps already have a logo and some design elements in place. But brand goes far beyond visual identity. On a deeper level, it’s about how your product makes people feel, and what associations they will have with your company and product. It extends across every interaction they have with you at every touchpoint.

Experience: How people experience your product

The experience of your users is key to reinforcing brand perception because it connects your product’s utility with your users’ emotional reaction. Experience encompasses everything from onboarding to social media presence to customer service.

User experience is the catalyst for creating brand advocates, who then create brand awareness for your new product. Ultimately, it’s not enough to just understand why someone would want your product; you have to understand how they will use it in order to understand its true value to them.

Product: What unique way you’ve solved a real user problem

Now for your actual product — ironically the very last piece to your value proposition. What are its key features and benefits? What user pain points does it solve?

Your product might simply do something ten times better than the products before it did. It might solve a problem that hasn’t been solved yet. Or it might address an untapped need in the market. Do your homework so you’re confident about the fact that you are, indeed, novel.

Your goal should be to create a product that does something so natural/special/unique that your users can’t help but talk to their friends about it. Nearly all of the current lineup of successful startups grew based on word of mouth, so marketing and sales budgets were largely redirected to product and experience development.

Put It Into Action

Once you’ve taken notes on the areas of brand, experience, and product, spend a little time whipping your ideas into a cohesive value proposition that encompasses all three.

Here’s a worksheet you can download to brainstorm the BxP exercise on your own.

• As you’re thinking about your value proposition, ask yourself two very important questions right up front: How will your brand make people feel? And what associations will they have with it? In or next to the “brand” circle on your map, write down a few words about this.
• In or next to the “experience” circle on your map, write down the user-experience angles that will differentiate you from competitors. What will set your user experience apart and “delight” your users, in the current parlance of the times (although it’s really timeless)? Forget about the generic stuff like “We’ll have excellent customer service.” Most people won’t believe you when you say that, anyway. Write down just a few words specific to things you can and will do better and differently.
• In or next to the “product” circle on your map, elucidate what makes your product itself truly different. What core features align with user needs and solve user problems? What features differentiate it from other products in the market that it may compete with?

We can’t stress this enough: the success of your product is directly tied to the value your customers get from it. The value that customers believe they get from your product drives every decision you make: marketing activities, production choices, and investment decisions. The purpose of this exercise is to figure out where you are superior. You can’t be just as good as your competitors, or even a little bit better. You have to be vastly superior in one or more of these categories.

Keep in mind that customer perception — along with customer desires — can change. And value propositions can certainly vary across industries and different market segments. This can put a lot of pressure on companies to constantly invest resources in market research in order to keep up with fickle customer moods and dynamic markets. But creating and delivering on value proposition is still a universally important step for business founders.

Read part 2 of this series, Where BxP Values Collide.

Want to keep going? Read our book Got Ideas? How to Turn Your Ideas into Products People Want to Use, which takes novice product-makers through the journey of creating great, user-friendly digital products from the thin air of their imaginations. Available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook, it’s a hands-on, practical manual for aspiring entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs.