You will be able to use the Value Proposition Canvas to check that your offer answers the customer's real pains and gains.
Farah, who sells modest workwear online, spent most of last year adding features. A new collection every month, a loyalty points scheme, gift wrapping, a style quiz on the website. Sales stayed flat. When she finally read through a few months of customer messages, the same two worries came up again and again: will it fit, and will it arrive before Monday? None of her new features answered either one.
This is a common pattern. Owners build what they find interesting, then hope customers care. A tool called the Value Proposition Canvas is designed to catch it early, by putting what the customer wants and what you offer side by side.
The Value Proposition Canvas was developed by Alexander Osterwalder and colleagues at the consultancy Strategyzer, and it is set out in their book Value Proposition Design. It has two halves.
On the right is the customer profile, which describes the customer in three parts: the jobs they are trying to get done, the pains that get in their way, and the gains they want. On the left is the value map, which describes your offer in three matching parts: your products and services, the ways they relieve pains, and the ways they create gains. You fill in the customer side first, because it keeps you from starting with what you already sell.
You can draw it on a sheet of paper with two columns.
You met jobs in lesson 3.2. They are the progress the customer is trying to make. For Farah's customers, one job is "look professional at work while dressing in a way that fits my faith". Another is "get dressed quickly on a weekday morning without second-guessing the outfit".
Pains are what annoys, worries or blocks the customer before, during or after the job. They include bad outcomes, obstacles and risks. For someone buying workwear online, a common pain is fear of ordering the wrong size and then dealing with the hassle of returns. Others: fabric that looks fine in photos but is too warm for the walk from the MRT, sleeves that turn out too short, a parcel that arrives after the event it was bought for.
Gains are the outcomes and benefits the customer wants. Some are basic expectations, such as the item matching the photo. Some go beyond the basic job, such as next-day delivery in Singapore, or a colleague asking where the blouse is from. It's tempting to list only the extras, but the canvas counts the basic expectations as gains too. List them, because missing one loses a sale as surely as an unrelieved pain does.
Once the customer profile is full, turn to the value map. For each pain, ask what in your offer relieves it. For each gain, ask what in your offer creates it.
For Farah, the sizing pain is relieved by a size chart with measurements in centimetres for each item, a model's height listed on every photo, and a clear exchange policy. The heat pain is relieved by stating the fabric and whether it is lined. The gain of next-day delivery is created if she can ship by courier the same day for orders placed before a cut-off time. The gain of a compliment at work is harder to promise, but photos of real customers wearing the items in real offices help a buyer picture it.
Where a pain or gain has nothing matched to it, you have a gap. Gaps are not failures. They are a list of things to fix, often cheaply. A size chart costs an afternoon.
The canvas also works in the other direction. Look at everything you offer and ask which pain it relieves or which gain it creates. Some items will have no link at all.
For Farah, the style quiz and the gift wrapping linked to nothing her customers had mentioned. They cost her time and money and created no value that buyers noticed. That doesn't mean every unlinked feature should go, because some customers you haven't spoken to may care. It means you shouldn't lead with them, and you should be cautious about building more of the same.
This is the hardest part of the exercise for most owners, because the features that link to nothing are often the ones they enjoyed making. However proud you are of a feature, if it relieves no pain and creates no gain, it is a cost without value.
The activity below asks you to fill in your own canvas. The customer side will take longer than you expect, so start there, and use the words from real messages, reviews and conversations wherever you can rather than writing pains you assume your customers have.
Fill in a canvas for your target customer with at least five pains and five gains, then link each to something you offer or mark it as a gap.
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