Big Picture Strategy

6Customer Beliefs

Working through each of the Big Picture Strategy 6Bs progressively focuses your go-to-market choices by considering each of the questions posed by the framework. By the time you get to this B, beliefs, you have chosen a particular group of customers to pursue based on their business category and brand behaviors. You now further refine your target customer opportunity analysis by considering which specific customers to prioritize based on their beliefs.

The processes described in this chapter will make your marketing more efficient and effective. Understanding customer beliefs and targeting customers whose attitudes match your capabilities allows you to prioritize potential customers who represent a good fit, thus using your marketing budget efficiently. A detailed understanding of your target audience is also key to constructing a value proposition that compellingly (and honestly) represents your brand. The more compelling your brand's value proposition, the more effective it will be.

This chapter has two goals: to give you tools to identify a positioning benefit for your brand, and to help you to develop and articulate a value proposition built around that benefit. A value proposition centers on a single-minded, targeted benefit. The value proposition process should drive resource allocation toward people most likely to welcome your offer. You choose a single-minded benefit to prioritize customers, you execute on that benefit, and later you focus on customers ...