The journey from Series A to a billion-dollar buyout begins with value planning and what we call the “Pick Two Methodology.”
Choosing your value power helps you focus and prioritize, creates a stronger ROI through better efficiencies, empowers your team, develops better customer understanding and loyalty, builds better partnerships, and helps you execute a marketing roadmap to growth, relevance, and success. The four categories that make up your value power. They are:
- Price
- Quality
- Customer intimacy
- Innovation
While each is important and must be considered, attempting to dominate across all four at once will only confuse the buyer (a recipe for disaster in an already dissonant marketplace!). Instead, focus is the name of the game, and picking two is the winning strategy.
PICK TWO
Picking two of the four value power categories is where true differentiation starts. It takes a brand far beyond table stakes and into areas where it can truly excel and jump ahead of the competition.
The Pick Two Methodology hinges on customer intimacy. We must put ourselves in the mindset of the consumer and stretch beyond a positioning that is all about product features to one that is about the customer’s needs. We must be bold and concern ourselves with what we want the consumer to think and feel about the brand while being aware of their pain points, struggles, desires, and the true BENEFIT the product serves in their daily life.
Brands, especially emerging brands, need to constantly revisit and refine their “Pick Two Methodology” so they can adapt as the market – and their growth trajectory – dictates. This is why regular competitive analyses are necessary and so vitally important.
We must look for signs in the marketplace, intel from the product development team, insights gathered from talking to customers and from competitive reviews to glean information that can tell us what to do next. Sometimes those changes happen slowly over years, others more quickly. Pivots ALWAYS happen, and knowing when to pivot is key.
Tune in to this insightful Q&A with Avocet’s president and CEO, Lori Jones, as she takes a deep dive – including case studies of Southwest Airlines, Apple, Salesforce, Home Depot, Amazon, and even a case study of one of the agency’s MedTech clients – into how parsing out value planning ultimately works.
