Why Authentic Value Proposition ?

The lingering pandemic, the Ukraine war, supply chain problems and inflation has all types of organizations reviewing their “value” proposition. The idea of an explicit contract in B2B and an implicit contract in B2C used to involve fewer parties. If there was a serious dispute there was arbitration, courts or government regulators who would step in and try to sort things out. No longer true in the world of instant social media. Think of Elon Musk’s Twitter purchase situation.

For everyday business it’s simply keeping your promises to your customers. To be fair, our experience is that Elon Musk is pretty good with Tesla in keeping customer promises. No matter how the Twitter acquisition plays out.

Since marketing is about customer value, it’s important to clarify the idea of value proposition in these challenging times:

“Dating Sunday” and Customer Relationship Management

The tectonic shift in marketing occurred  in the late 1980’s and 1990’s particularly with the publication of Dwyer, Schurr and Oh (1987) that spelt out the parallel between the long term human marriage and business relationships. It was earlier in Europe that scholars of the European Industrial Marketing and Purchasing Group figured out that B2B relationships are long term that B2B marketers who really sold anything already used.Similarly in B2C marketers had been using customer  relationships data for a hundred years in direct ma

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