most common alternative, though, is the ‘do-nothing’ option.

if you put yourself in the customer’s shoes and think what you would look for, it’s a good starting point. Think about product or service needs, of course, but also think about support, service quality, relationships, knowledge, skills required to deliver, how easy (or not) it is to buy from you, and so on.

When you have done your homework, there is a neat way to assess and summarize your points of difference using a simple matrix. It looks something like Figure

value proposition becomes the heart of the business model.

USPs often were not directly related to value and, sometimes, not even directly related to the product or service.

for as long as our film producer continues to lead his business on the basis of its being a ‘corporate film production company’, prospects will assess it on that basis and may try to drive down prices to a commoditized,

value propositions can only function within what we term a value-focused enterprise, and value focus is a function of the way clients and customers are viewed and treated.

Taiichi Ohno, the genius behind the Toyota lean manufacturing system, said: ‘All we are doing is looking at the timeline from the moment the customer gives us an order to the point when we collect the cash. And we are reducing that timeline by removing the non-value-added

Substitutes are always present, but they are easy to overlook because they may appear to be very different from the industry’s product. It is a substitute to do without, to purchase a used product rather than a new one, or to do it yourself