At the heart of every strong medical product success is a good value proposition, here you’ll find out what makes a great one.
The influential powers that determine customer preference may not always be initially evident. This is why we must understand what our customers are really looking for in terms of Jobs-to-be-Done, gains, and pains and consequently design products that will delight them and speak their language in our promotional material.
What makes a good value proposition?
Combining different sources, this is my personal list of factors to consider when building a good value proposition:
- Early start: To start developing a product with no clear objectives is too common a mistake. The value proposition design process is the basis for defining the product development plan and clinical development.
- Collaboration: Although the product manager should orchestrate the design of the value proposition this doesn’t mean that it is a solo project. Robust value propositions should combine elements and data from various functions, including R&D, medical, regulatory, health economics, market access, and commercial.
- Iterations: Designing the value proposition is a process not an event. Moreover, once defined the value proposition should evolve over the years. For example, as new data are available, new customers are considered and the landscape shifts, the value proposition should be reviewed, adapted, and refined to remain effective.
- Solving important problems: Despite customers having different views on jobs, gains, and pains, good value propositions are required to investigate and prioritize problems that are worth solving.
- Tailoring: Since the stakeholders are numerous with different needs and different weights across the markets, it is necessary to develop a set of value propositions adapted to the differentiated needs.
- Market validation: There is only one way to design and evaluate the impact of the value proposition in the real world; it is to test it and validate it with real customers. A common mistake is to consider testing the value proposition with only a few KOLs involved in the clinical evaluation or product development. This mistake should be avoided at all costs.
- Differentiation: A good value proposition should help to differentiate the product from competitors, addressing different needs with different features and clinical evidence. And substantially exceed the competition in at least one area.
- Communication: The base of integrated marketing communication is effectively telling your value proposition with a clear and consistent message through all the channels and to all the stakeholders. As good products do not sell by themselves, a good value proposition needs to be properly and continuously communicated across the channels.
- Addressing a sizable market: A good value proposition should address a significant number of customers or a small number of customers with significant financial availability.
- Matching customer success: Great value propositions produce outcomes that customers define as success. During the market research, it is important to deeply investigate what is considered a successful job to be done by the customer and not by the members of the cross-functional team of the company.
- Defendable: The value proposition should be based on elements that are difficult to copy, in this way, the entry barriers will be higher. Typical ways to protect a good value proposition are patents, strong brands, clinical evidence, and any uniqueness factor.
I hope you found this list (of elements to consider when developing a value proposition) useful in avoiding common mistakes.
As previously discussed, I’m convinced that developing a compelling value proposition is essential in the medical market.
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