Читать книгу Value Merchants - Nirmalya Kumar - Страница 27

The second customer value proposition, favorable points of difference, explicitly recognizes there is an alternative open to the customer. The recent experience of a leading industrial gas supplier underscores this distinction. It received a request for proposal from a customer for a major piece of business stating that the two or three suppliers that could demonstrate the most persuasive value propositions in their proposals would be invited to visit the supplier and to discuss and refine their proposals. After the meeting, the customer would select a supplier for this business.

As this example illustrates, “Why should our firm purchase your offering instead of your competitor’s?” is a more pertinent question than “Why should our firm purchase your offering?” Why? Because the former question focuses supplier managers on differentiating their offering from the next-best alternative, which requires more detailed knowledge of it. A characteristic that the favorable-points-of-difference proposition shares with the all-benefits proposition, though, is that more is regarded as better, so supplier managers strive to list as many favorable points of difference as they can.

Knowing that an offering element is a point of difference relative to the next-best alternative does not, however, convey what the value of this difference is to target customers. Further, a supplier’s market offering may have several points of difference relative to the next-best alternative, which complicates understanding which of them delivers the greatest value to target customers. Without a detailed understanding of the customer’s requirements and preferences, and what it is worth to fulfill them, suppliers may stress points of difference that deliver relatively little value to the target customer. Each of these can lead to the potential pitfall of value presumption : assuming that favorable points of difference must be valuable for the customer. Our opening anecdote in chapter 1 about the IC supplier that unnecessarily discounted its price nicely illustrates the likely outcome when supplier salespeople stress favorable points of difference that actually have little value for the customer.