Jeff Standridge (Intro):
Are you ready to change the trajectory of your business and see massive improvements? Each week, we’ll share strategies and practices to generate sustained results and long-lasting success in your organization. Welcome to the Innovation Junkies Podcast.
Jeff Standridge:
Hey, guys. Welcome to another episode of the Innovation Junkies Podcast. I’m Jeff Standridge.
Jeff Amerine:
Hey, this is Jeff Amerine. Glad to be back.
Jeff Standridge:
Yeah, sure is. Hey, man. Season two, can you believe it?
Jeff Amerine:
Yeah, it’s hard to believe anybody would renew us for a second season, but I’m sure glad to be here.
Jeff Standridge:
Yeah, no cancellation notices in our inbox.
Jeff Amerine:
That’s right. That’s right.
Jeff Standridge:
So let’s talk a little bit about season two. We’re going to do something a little different here. Kind of shake it up, right?
Jeff Amerine:
Yeah. I think that we’re going to talk about some of our experiences and some of the things that we’ve learned over long careers of being innovation facilitators and some, kind of, best practices that we use every day when we do consulting.
Jeff Standridge:
That’s right. We may throw in a special guest once in a while, but for the most part in season two, you’re going to have the Jeffs talking about innovation, strategic growth, everything from sales and marketing to digital readiness and everything in between.
Jeff Amerine:
Yeah. And the other thing too is because we know people’s time is precious, these are going to typically be 10-minute episodes.
Jeff Standridge:
Awesome. I say, we get started. What are we talking about today?
Jeff Amerine:
Why don’t we talk about that dreaded unique value proposition, UVP, that is famous with Business Canvas, Lean Canvas and other forms of design thinking. What do you say?
Jeff Standridge:
I love it. Some people call it the unique selling proposition. In the Lean Canvas, in the innovation world, they call it the unique value proposition. How about we talk about four things that you can do to help you stand out among your competition, specifically as it relates to your UVP?
Jeff Amerine:
Yeah, that sounds fantastic. And finding that unique value proposition, discovering it, identifying it, making sure that it resonates with the audience that you’re trying to sell to or trying to convince that you’re solving a problem we’re solving is really key.
Jeff Standridge:
Yeah. Well, that’s good. And I was going to ask you, how would you define UVP to start with? Right?
Jeff Amerine:
Well, for me, it’s a short, compelling statement that describes how your venture or your product or your service is going to create new value or a solution that’s going to be meaningful to your customer.
Jeff Standridge:
That’s right. Agree. Agree with that. Short and compelling. The first thing that you got to start with, in my experience as well, is in really understanding who your target customer is. If you don’t know who your target customer is, then you can’t create a clear, crisp, concise, compelling statement that’s going to resonate with them. So you got to start with knowing who they are and what are the pain points that they experience on a regular basis. So there are two very critical aspects to discovering your unique value proposition. Any others that you can think of?
Jeff Amerine:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think it is something that has to speak to the audience. It’s not really quite a tagline. It’s a little bit more than that. And an example I give, which might be illustrative, is if you think about Walmart as an example, everybody has heard “save money and live better,” and that’s a tagline, and everyone within that company and most customers can recite that. It’s been kind of ingrained into the fabric of the way we think about them.
But the real unique value proposition for them is they’re going to help customers save money and live better every day through everyday low pricing, delivered by the world’s most efficient supply chain. That’s the whole statement. It ties into their purpose. It ties into their tagline. It’s short enough to be easy to remember it, but it’s really more than the “Just Do It” type of thing that you’d get from Nike.
Jeff Standridge:
Yeah, yeah. The other thing I think it does… So we talked about how you got to identify your target market. You got to understand their pain points. The other thing is really understand what makes you different in the market, that uniqueness, if you will, and their uniqueness is everyday low prices, and it’s that world-class efficiency in their supply chain.
Jeff Amerine:
Yeah, that’s exactly right. I mean, they were able to achieve that by virtue of scale and growing quickly. And they leverage that every day and every way they can, for sure.
Jeff Standridge:
So once we discover that unique value proposition, we know how we’re solving the pain points, that our target customers experience, we know what makes us different and what makes us stand out, then we’ve got to make it clear and compelling, and we’ve got to state it in a way that actually resonates with our target, with those target customers.
Jeff Amerine:
Exactly. It needs to be in the language that the customer uses and that they will understand. It needs to not have jargon in it, and it needs to be something that would be easy for all your associates or your employees to recite and for customers to remember.
Jeff Standridge:
Yeah. And then we’ve got to make sure that it is known and lived, if you will, by everyone in the organization, that they know it by heart. Any thoughts on how we can help our employees and teammates and associates across the company to not only know it by heart, but to live it every day?
Jeff Amerine:
Well, I think that’s one of those things that unique value proposition, in many ways, ties back to the purpose of the organization and the culture of the organization. So those two things are kind of woven together. They can’t be taken separately. And I think that kind of reinforcement in making sure that your associates understand that that is essentially a statement of why you need to exist and why your customers should care. If that’s woven into the culture, it’s something that they should remember every day, and it’ll be reinforced through performance incentives and through just the way that leadership and team members talk to each other.
Jeff Standridge:
So you talked about Walmart’s unique value proposition. I’m going to throw out a few others and let you maybe respond to these.
Jeff Amerine:
Sure.
Jeff Standridge:
And maybe you can even guess as to who they might be. Here’s one. “The smartest way to get around.”
Jeff Amerine:
Maybe that’s Uber.
Jeff Standridge:
Uber. Yeah. Uber. What do you think about that?
Jeff Amerine:
Well, the fact that I could figure that out being the age that I am and not a frequent Uber user means it’s probably a pretty good statement.
Jeff Standridge:
Yeah. What about this one? “The experience is the product.”
Jeff Amerine:
That’s Apple, maybe.
Jeff Standridge:
Yeah.
Jeff Amerine:
I don’t know.
Jeff Standridge:
Two for two. Two for two.
Jeff Amerine:
I’m like the UVP champion of the world.
Jeff Standridge:
That’s great. Okay. Here’s one, and I know you’re a user of this. “Be more productive at work with less effort.”
Jeff Amerine:
That would be Woodford Reserve, bourbon.
Jeff Standridge:
Man. Well, you just missed that one. Just missed it. That’s actually Slack. So you think about what Slack enables teams to do – be more productive at work with less effort. That’s another good one there.
Well, finally, one thing about the unique value proposition I think is important is considering what your company stands for and how you can really bake that into your unique value proposition. I’ve got a company that I work with, and they say their unique value proposition is “Excellent people delivering excellent service to excellent clients,” and all of those things make up their value proposition. Their world-class portfolio of local businesses, the fact that they deliver excellent service to those folks and the fact that they have a world-class team of people actually delivering that excellent service, and they can use that in their recruiting, their hiring, in their client servicing, and what have you. So understand what your company stands for.
Jeff Amerine:
Yeah, it’s important. And it really does need to be more than kind of marketing eyewash, something that’s on the wall. It really does need to be something that’s tightly integrated into your purpose, mission, vision, core values, all those cultural sort of guardrails.
Jeff Standridge:
So if you want to step back and maybe four things that you can do as a business right now to really work on your unique value proposition is: get very specific about who your target market is and whom you’re trying to reach and whom you’re trying to serve, recognize the critical pain points that they have, that you can solve, define what makes you different as an organization and what makes you stand out from your competition, and then finally, consider what you stand for as a company.
And when you spend a little bit of time with you and your employees, and maybe even some of your customers, around those four questions, it’ll make it easier for you to figure out precisely what is your unique value proposition.
Jeff Amerine:
Great stuff, Jeff.
Jeff Standridge:
Anything else? All right. Hey, this has been another episode of the Innovation Junkies Podcast. Thank you for joining.
Jeff Amerine (Outro):
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