Monday, August 11, 2008

Customer value proposition

In the field of marketing, a customer value proposition consists of the sum total of benefits which a vendor promises that a customer will receive in return for the customer's associated payment (or other value-transfer). A customer relationship management software helps company to make customer value proposition.

In simple words: value proposition = what the customer gets for what the customer pays.

Accordingly, a customer can evaluate a company's value-proposition on two broad dimensions with multiple subsets:

  • relative performance: what the customer gets from the vendor relative to a competitor's offering;
  • price: which consists of the payment the customer makes to acquire the product or service; plus the access cost

The vendor-company's marketing and sales efforts offer a customer value proposition; the vendor-company's delivery and customer-service processes then fulfill that value-proposition. Agents web world needs to do a lot effort to have proper value-proposition.

Value-proposition as marketing tool
A value-proposition can assist in a firm's marketing strategy, and may guide a business to target a particular market segment. For example: "Firm Any Co. can provide benefits a, b, and c because of competencies x, y, and z."
Whether for a product, service or a company as a whole, this formulation can allow a firm to see if its competencies align with the segment that it plans to target.