Guerric De Ternay - The Value Mix: Create Meaningful Products and Services for Your Audience

THE

VALUE MIX

by Guerric de Ternay

The Value Mix by Guerric de Ternay

Copyright 2018-2021 Guerric de Ternay

All rights reserved.

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The Value Mix framework is protected under Creative Commons licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. This license requires that reusers give credit to the creator. It allows reusers to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format, for non-commercial purposes only. If others remix, adapt, or build upon the material, they may not distribute the modified material.

A uthor name: Guerric de Ternay

Title: The Value Mix: Create Meaningful Products and Services for Your Audience

For those who shake up things, challenge the status quo, and make cool stuff happen.

Acknowledgements

A massive thank you to Sgolne and Amaury for always helping me with everything I do!

Big big thanks to Mara, Manu, Oskar, Patricia, Alex, Kirsten, Olli, and Toby for their constant support and the endless crazy chats about life, creativity, and innovation!

New Edition

T he Value Mix was first published in 2018 on Leanpub and in 2019 on Amazon. A few years later, I still believe that the framework presented in the book can significantly help businesses create value for their audience by launching bolder, more meaningful propositions.

I wanted to update the content to add more examples, clarify some explanations, and prompt you to action with the key questions youll find at the end of each chapter.

Throughout the book, I refer to you as the person responsible for marketing and innovation in the company. But over the years, I realised that many readers are also consultants, students, and investors. This shows how universal the topic of creating new value propositions is.

I hope you enjoy this new edition of the book.

Its difficult to create a product that people really want to buy and use. Theres no silver bullet to success. Its hard work because theres lots of uncertainty.

Those who do this for a living know that.

Fortunately, over the past two decades, the management literature has equipped us with better ways to create new products, such as:

1. Customer centricity . Design thinking and customer development are two approaches that encourage us to build products for potential customers rather than trying to find customers for new products;
2. Iterative development . The lean startup methodology pushes us to apply the scientific method and pursue continuous learning and product iteration to create better products.

But, we are still missing a way to organise the information and insight we gather about our customers to clearly define what they need and want.

To help you develop successful products and services, you need a framework that:

1. Allows you to gain a deep understanding of what value means for your customers;
2. Gives you a shared language to align with your team on a strategy for the new products and services that you will launch.

This framework must be as accurate as possible, by capturing enough nuances to reflect the reality of our world. But it also needs to be practical enough so it can be used by anyone in your company who is involved in the process of launching new products and services.

U nder the pressure of growth and profit targets, most organisations focus too much on their commercial priorities and not enough on creating value for their customers and users.

Putting the people who buy and use your products and services at the centre of your new product development process sounds common sense. But this isnt an intuitive behaviour. It seems that its easier for a company to be product-centric than human-centred.

The easy way to force a business to focus on their customers and users is to talk about finding a solution to a problem, i.e., your customers have problems and your product is the solution .

This framework, which comes from the world of engineering, does help. But it creates the limiting belief that innovation is about finding a solution to a problem. The problem-solution dichotomy works. But it doesnt capture enough nuances. This framework limits the scope of value creation. It misses the fact that people do not just buy a solution. They also buy brands, stories, emotional benefits, and experiences.

Solving a problem isnt the only way to create value for your customers. What people perceive as value isnt just functional. It also relies on how your products and services make them feel.

Innocent, a smoothie brand, didnt create value for its customers by solving a smoothie problem. The company created stories and remarkable experiences that made people feel connected to the Innocent brand.

Marshall, a brand known for its music amplifiers, didnt solve a headphones problem when it launched a range of branded headphones. The brand built on its heritage of music amplifiers, creating value by making its customers dream and feel like they were at a concert watching their favourite band.

Action is what produces results. Knowledge is only potential power until it comes into the hands of someone who knows how to get himself to take effective action.

Tony Robbins, Life strategist

T he Value Mix aims to make it easier for you to think about the nuances of creating products and services that people will want, i.e., creating value for them.

I wanted this framework to be simple to remember and easy to use, while still acknowledging the complexity and nuances of the real world.

Together, we will go through each element of the Value Mix. Youll get everything you need to understand the concept of value creation and then turn what you learnt into action.

Let me emphasise that this isnt a box-filling exercise.

Reality is complex. So one cannot pretend to capture in a single framework all the nuances necessary to create successful products and services.

This book aims to guide your thinking. The real value lies in doing the work, i.e., understanding your customers at a deeper emotional level and developing new ways to create value for them.