Summary: Putting the unique in unique value proposition.
For customer value propositions, it’s obvious that the ‘customer’ is the cornerstone of success, right? Deeply understanding your audience helps you create offers that resonate with their needs. With insights from existing data and primary research (predominantly customer interviews), you’ll uncover underlying motivations and emotions influencing their choices, crafting customer value propositions that not only address surface-level requirements but speak to their core issues.
If you want a quick refresher on the 3 C’s of proposition, of which customer is always the first, check out this article: https://stratinn.co.uk/Innsights/creating-a-unique-value-proposition-the-3-cs
Introduction, finding your unique value proposition
Understanding how competitors position themselves and identifying their strengths/weaknesses through the lens of customer need and pain points is a crucial step in creating a unique value proposition that turns the heads of customers. Often it’s the most difficult of the 3 C’s to do as information can be scant.
Just use AI… right?
So, it wouldn’t be a modern, up-to-date piece of advice if we didn’t talk about using AI. It seems that there are a lot of new tools that’ll help you very quickly get to some early answers with respect to what your competitors are doing. If you’ve stumped for ChatGPT Pro at $200 a month that can do deep research (I’m writing this in Feb 2025 so things might have changed by the time you read this), there is a lot of value that can be drawn. But, user beware, Large Language Models (LLMs) can hallucinate information that doesn’t exist, even hard data points, so you need to tread carefully.
AI is great and you can use the tools to analyse the information generated in the approaches outlined below but do be careful using it as the sole or even primary source of information.
Ask your customers
The absolute best way to get an un-biased view as to what your competitors stand for and how they perform is to talk to their customers. Helpfully, your customers are often customers of theirs too or at least have been customers of theirs. They will know who has a more unique value proposition in the market.
During your customer interviews (see our previous article on the Customer lens of proposition) you should take time to ask them a few key questions around your competitors. Questions might include;
- How else would you solve for this need/pain if you didn’t use us?
- Who else would you use? Why would you / haven’t you?
- Who else have you used? Why did you?
- Would you use them again? Why / why not?
- What are they really good at?
- What’s the main reason you would use / buy them?
- What are they bad / weak at?
This’ll give you a good amount of qualitative insight into what your competitors offer them and their various strengths and weaknesses from a buyers perspective.
Talk to your team and to experts
Another keyway to get insights on your competitor is to talk to your team. Now there is a health warning here, this is not an un-biased sample by any stretch but it can provide useful information when used wisely. Talk to your team members how they see the relative strengths and weaknesses between competitor offers.
Some of them will have been previous employees (DO NOT expect them to divulge any confidential information here please, this will lead you into dangerous territory with the law) and many will have been customers of theirs. For example, several of our clients in the insurance space have hired employees from their client organisations (the intermediary brokers) who have often bought from competitors themselves and so know first-hand, what they’re like.
Alongside employees who might have insight into the wider market, seek out independent sector experts and consultants who you can talk to (you might need to pay for their time). Again, people who’ve often worked supply side, client side, in consultancies who work with several organisations in the sector often know a lot about the different players already. Have we just found a possible positive for consultants? Maybe…
Explore their collateral
In addition to getting perspectives through the customer interviews and talking to experts (internal and external), it’s important to analyse public-facing collateral such as website, social media content, news and event material where available.
Going further, you may also want to capture information on specific partnerships and/or investments competitors are making to indicate their direction of travel and current positioning. Unfortunately, this is not always straightforward and can be a challenge given the realities of a business can be very different to what they project externally. Leveraging the insight from customer interviews along with internal team interviews (especially where the team member may be an ex-employee of the competitor) can be veryhelpful in cutting through their marketing fluff to what their real proposition is in the market.
While tricky, the competitor analysis usually offers several potential areas for differentiation, gaps competitors are ignoring, assumptions they are making about the customers they serve and can highlight where your offerings might uniquely address market needs.
While we recommend you try to do a little of this yourself, there is a case for careful use of LLMs (with internet search capability) to speed up the process. Make sure you check their sources to assess the accuracy of the data and the LLMs interpretation and analysis of the data.
What’s their proposition?
This is where the skill and experience comes to play, it’s taking all the information you’ve gathered from customers, your team, independent experts and from desk research (or your LLM of choice) and distilling it into a market map of the different propositions your competitors offer in the market. It’s a view as to the different ‘positions’ each of them play.
Typically, in any large stable market you’ll get some, ‘we’re big and global’ players, whereas some offer different types of ‘best value’ through feature vs. price combinations, some who position around varying elements of ‘quality’ and others around specific technologies (anyone say blockchain, big data, AI?). There will also be more nuanced and creative possibilities besides these too.
Your job is to understand the different propositions your competitors are putting into the market and to identify where there might be white space you can occupy as a business or areas where you feel your competitors’ position, but they have no right to own that territory. Maybe they have significant weaknesses that you surfaced through talking to customers.
This is where the customer, team and expert interviews come into their own, you can cut through the external collateral they publish and get down to what they’re really good and bad at delivering for customers.
Conclusion
So, there you have it, some simple ways to get an insight on your competitors and start to analyse it in a way that’s helpful for you as you develop or refine your own proposition, or you start to build out a longer-term strategy for growth. Through these techniques you’ll be able to put the ‘unique’ in unique value proposition.
Should you want a full, in-depth guide to developing propositions from end-to-end, get our free (no email) guide: https://stratinn.co.uk/how-to-craft-a-compelling-customer-proposition-guide-download
