What are the best ways to apply strategic thinking tools to enhance your company's value proposition?

SWOT Analysis: Identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to refine your value proposition in alignment with market dynamics. Customer Journey Mapping: Understand customer interactions to tailor your value proposition at each touchpoint, addressing specific needs. Competitor Analysis: Know your competitors well. Blue Ocean Strategy: Explore uncontested market spaces, innovating your value proposition to create new demand and outperform competitors. Business Model Canvas: Use this visual tool to map out key elements of your business, ensuring alignment with your value proposition. Value Chain Analysis: Assess each step in your value chain to optimize efficiency and enhance the overall value delivered to customers.

Beyond just identification, it serves as a foundation for actionable strategy development, enabling organizations to not only understand but also effectively leverage their internal capabilities while navigating external challenges, thus ensuring a well-rounded approach to enhancing their overall value proposition in the marketplace.

SWOT is great for sparking internal discussions. However, success hinges on engaging current and potential customers directly. Many companies build in silos, missing crucial user feedback. The growing emphasis on UX research is a positive trend; it ensures the early integration of customer insights, fostering a mindful approach to the individuals we are building for.

SWOT Analysis is a very common tool to assess a corporations current standing in it's particular business target market. Additionally, what some Executive Managers forget is that SWOT is a tool to Forecast future business operations. Most large corporations create business Forecasts for 1 year, 3 year and 5 years in advance. Some large corporation even create a 10 year Forecast, with the vision of where the corporation will stand in 10 years from the current date. So Yes, SWOT is a great tool for the immediate assessment of a corporation; additionally I encourage Executives to also use to Forecast future business goals and milestones to achieve, in order to sustain the business for the long-term.

SWOR is great. But it is only a starting point. To actually gain value from strategy, you need a means to take action. I begin with a SWOT analysis to understand the business landscape, then analyze it through the lens of ProCore principles like self-reliance and action. This guides me in determining strategic actions, shaping them into concrete plans that enhance value. THAT is where the value lays. Concrete action taken on the back of analysis.

Value chain analysis is crucial for businesses to identify opportunities for cost reduction, efficiency improvement, and enhanced value delivery to customers. Conducting a value chain analysis involves breaking down business activities into primary and support processes. Identify key activities from the point of inception to distribution, assessing their cost at each stage alongwith their value contribution. Examine each element's competitive advantage and interdependencies. This will help in analyzing how innovation can impact each stage. Accordingly, one needs to assess supplier and customer relationships for optimization. It is an iterative exercise to stay responsive to industry changes and maintain a competitive edge in the market.

Value Chain Analysis is another effective tool in assessing a businesses current strategic operational strengths and weaknesses. Another valuable use of this tool is to forecast and prepare for the "unexpected". It goes back to the theory that "whatever can go wrong, likely WILL go wrong". The way to minimize this strategic business exposure is to use former Secretaries of Defense, Robert McNamara and Donald Rumsfeld's strategy of the "Unknown-Knowns". "The things you think you know, that it turns out you did not", to anticipate adverse consequences before they take place. When Executives have employees' livelihood depending on decisions they make, it is critical for Executives to consider any and all possible unforeseen circumstances.

Value chain analysis can significantly boost a company's value proposition by identifying efficiencies and competitive advantages at each operation stage. Examining procurement, production, distribution, and customer service reveals cost-saving or quality-enhancing opportunities. Strategic investments in innovation or enhanced service features can distinguish offerings in the market. Streamlining collaboration throughout the chain improves the customer experience. Thus, value chain analysis ensures all business elements align to strengthen the overall value proposition.

Scenario planning as a tool is essential to fortify your company's value proposition by anticipating future market shifts. In a dynamic and VUCA environment it is essential to explore various scenarios, considering economic, technological, and competitive factors alongwith potential challenges. To conduct scenario planning, identify key uncertainties, create plausible scenarios, and assess their impact on your business. Strategize responses and contingency plans for each scenario, enabling proactive decision-making in dynamic environments. Regularly review and update these scenarios to stay agile and resilient. This strategic foresight enables you to tailor your value proposition to align with changing customer needs.

Let's start by exploring customer personas, utilizing tools to gain a deep understanding of their needs and preferences. Guiding tool is the SWOT analysis, enabling us to unveil internal strengths and identify external opportunities, ensuring our proposition aligns seamlessly with the market landscape. Employing journey mapping as a dynamic tool aids us in visualizing and enhancing every customer touchpoint, creating a smooth and tailored experience. Additionally, scenario planning becomes instrumental in foreseeing potential shifts, enabling us to proactively adapt our proposition.

Scenario Planning is a good "role playing" tool to identify and challenge strategic operational assumptions, as to whether they come from "rational and well thought logic" or "off-the-hip, emotional and non-rational logic". Each key Executive member of a corporation has their own perspective on how to respond to a operational challenge. Often times, when those perspectives are scrutinized, it is found that the particular perspective may have been flawed by a personal negative experience that person may have had previously, and is not valid in the current circumstance. Therefore, it is important to always take into consideration the possibility that there may be underlying factor of a person's assumptions.

Scenario planning helps a business stay ahead of the curve. For example, a coffee shop exploring scenarios might predict a trend in health-conscious consumers. By preparing to introduce a line of sugar-free or plant-based options ahead of time, the shop ensures it keeps offering what customers want, keeping its appeal strong no matter how preferences shift. This approach not only attracts trend-savvy customers but also shows investors the company is adaptable and future-ready.

Crafting a Business Model Canvas, is one of my preferred ways to bolster the value proposition of organisations. Imagine an association focused on clean water initiatives. By mapping out key resources and partnerships, they might partner with a global filtration company, offering communities education and resources to access clean water. This strategic move not only broadens their impact but also sets them apart by directly linking their mission to tangible community benefits, showcasing innovation and commitment to their cause.

Business Model Canvases are only the start of understanding a corporations standing in the marketplace. Since the needs of the marketplace is constantly changing, any business which does not make strategic operational changes to match the marketplace needs, will inevitably suffer loss in revenue. Being able to evolve with current marketplace needs is a key success factor for any seasoned Executive and the business for which he/she is responsible in sustaining or even dominating it's position in the marketplace.

Consider the type of company you are, your resources, and your commitments before choosing to enter in a blue ocean strategy. It's not all smooth sailing. Blue oceans are blue for a reason: some barrier, be it regulatory, technological, cultural, or economical have so far prevented companies from participating in this market. Has there been a sudden, hidden, or personal opportunity that allows you to take advantage where others cannot? If you do have an opportunity, be prepared to dedicate a lot of resources to educating the customer and developing the market. If you succeed, then you win a first mover advantage. P.S. sometimes being a second mover may be better: you can simply take advantage of a market that someone else has educated.

In our sector, Blue Ocean Strategies are the rare and exciting opportunities to look out for. Embracing a Blue Ocean Strategy, an organisation can carve out an uncontested space. For instance, an international music education association that switches to virtual reality (VR) concerts could be considered 'blue ocean'. Such an approach would enable it to reach wider audiences while raising funds for music programs in underserved communities. Such a novel approach cuts through the noise of traditional fundraisers, offering an immersive experience that's both enjoyable and impactful, showcasing the nonprofit's innovative spirit and dedication to global music education.

Blue Ocean Strategy is another excellent Executive management tool, usually taught at only the highest academic schools such as Harvard. Whether a business is part of a global corporation or local corporation, constantly improving the "value of services or products" to it's clients, keeps the corporation out of the "lowest price" comparison. From my own personal experience, clients value any corporation which can validate the rational for the cost of contracting for "higher value", even though it will cost more; rather the "lowest cost" which usually equals less quality of service or products. "Higher Value" is a key branding component of any business which needs to set itself apart from the rest of the crowd.

I have been assisting companies with strategy for many years. My goal is always to try to make things as simple as possible. In this effort, I created a formula for building an effective strategy. Valued Differentiation X Disciplined Execution In other words, you must bring something to the marketplace that is unique and compelling, that your target customer values very highly, that is difficult – if not impossible – to copy, and that you can consistently execute it with excellence. If you can create a strategy that meets all four of these criteria, you will have unique value proposition.

A recent study by McKinsey found that the average life-span of companies listed in Standard & Poor’s 500 was 61 years in 1958. Today, it is less than 18 years. McKinsey believes that, in 2027, 75% of the companies currently quoted on the S&P 500 will have disappeared. That means that the strategy has to be operationalized: culture of innovation, new business models and internal mechanisms have to be structured so that the company can 1/define future vision 2/meet future vision. A strategy by itself does not bear results. From a best practice standpoint, there should be a single threaded leader for strategy that brings in the appropriate people, process and technology stakeholders and aligns on short, medium and long term goals.

There's always so many things you can do to improve value proposition for your users. In my experience, Horizon model is a great tool to leverage in decided how to invest your resources and what kind of value proposition to bring for your users. Simply put, you should always be thinking about improving your fundamentals, growth, and disruptive innovation at a given time. If you are only improving your fundamentals making sure your service is robust and reliable and customers are happy with the existing scenarios, you'll eventually lose to competitors who are bringing in new disruptive and innovative solutions. On the other hand, if you are only thinking about innovative solutions, your product's quality suffers.

Competitor analysis is essential. It shows you who else is on the market, how they are positioning themselves and shows you the opportunities for cutting through the noise and finding a unique position. You want to be one of the only companies offering this solution or offering it in this way. You can then stick your flag in the ground and really stand behind it as a value proposition.

Besides the other tools listed above, which are all very useful. There are a few others of note. First, is Barney's RBV or Resource Based View of Competitiveness strategy. This helps a company look inward at their resources and capabilities. Another is Porter's 5 Forces Analysis which helps a company look externally at their market environment.