Session Three

Opening — The Question Beneath Every Purchase.

The value proposition question, posed in the prospect's own first person, and the single word that every real answer implies. You write your organisation's answer before any framework is given.

Exercise 3.A — the cold answer, kept for comparison at the end of the day.

Where the Concept Came From.

A hundred and twenty years of commercial literature and more than 1,100 academic articles compressed into four eras — and the point at which the term fractured into a dozen labels with no shared meaning.

The Three-Point Dialogue.

Every value proposition is a conversation between what you offer, what the prospect wants, and what your competitor claims. Miss one point and the proposition collapses into a boast.

Principle Four: value is comparative, never absolute.

The Value Proposition Heuristic.

Rc[Vf − Cf] = Nf, term by term: gross value force, gross cost force, acceptance as a multiplier, and net force as the only quantity that reaches the prospect.

Includes Exercise 3.B — score a live claim.

Break

The Purchase Dyad — Appeal and Exclusivity.

Why the two forces pull against one another, why most organisations optimise the wrong one, and what an offer looks like when it holds both at once.

Includes Exercise 3.C — plot four competitors.

Locating a Value Proposition in the Wild.

A rapid method for finding the operative value proposition on any page in under a minute — or establishing that there isn't one. Worked on real pages, at speed.

Includes Exercise 3.D — sixty-second location drill.

LAB 4 — Competitive Claims.

Small groups take one category and three competing pages. Extract each claim, score it on the heuristic, and identify the gap in the category that nobody is occupying. Readouts to the room.

Close.