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Doing It Right, The Central Place of Your Business Idea: Every business starts with an idea. Someone sees an opportunity to create a product or service that someone else wants badly enough to pay for. Simply stated, this is the business idea, and it defines what your particular business is all about. There are two integral parts to the business idea.
These assumptions, when accurate, give your business idea its power and focus. The idea blossoms within the fertile ground of the assumptions from which it sprang. A business is organized around those assumptions. You position the company and your offerings within the dictates of those assumptions. You express your identity, who you are and what you’re about, based on the logic of these assumptions. As you put your fully considered business idea into words, you are pronouncing your value proposition. The value proposition contains your deal. “Here’s what I’ll (we’ll) do and this is what you need to pay in return for the resulting goods and/or services.” You are communicating a simple, but vital message about your business. You want to be understood. To make sure that the largest possible audience understands it accurately, you have to talk about it. You don’t say it once and hope that everyone gets it. You make sure that they do. There are actually two very distinct conversations that you need to have about your value proposition. You have to develop a story for internal consumption. That is, you have to express the value proposition in a way that allows you to develop a game plan for your company to use in how it’s organized, and how it’s to function to create the products and/or services that you are offering to the marketplace. This is a story that creates the conversations that enable you and your people, and even more importantly, your people amongst themselves, to share an understanding about how you use your capabilities to do what you are promising. The second story is the one you develop for external consumption. This is the brand promise. It’s the story that you take to the marketplace. It’s the one you want to use to peak the interest of the universe of buyers. It’s also the story you use to attract those who are ready to buy---your customers. The brand promise is the value that is unique to the goods or services you are providing. It sets you apart from your competition. It is that certain something that the customers can come to expect from doing business with you. When it is well-considered, it offers qualities or features that the customer can’t get elsewhere. This promise, when consistently delivered by your people, generates the “stickiness” that keeps them coming back for more. The game plan and the brand promise must be aligned for stickiness to be achieved. That is, your people have to appreciate the why behind how they are doing what they need to do, otherwise, they will not be able to understand their priorities and make good decisions in uncommon situations. Your customers have to be able to be sure that these qualities or features, the ones that mean something to them, are going to be there every time. After all, that’s the deal! Therefore, your people need to be well-informed enough to be able to follow through on your company’s brand promise.
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