The Value Mix: The Framework to Create Meaningful Products and Services for Your Audience

By Guerric de Ternay

NEW VALUE PROPOSITION DESIGN

 

A strong value proposition should get your customers interested in buying your products without requiring you to over-engineer your sales and marketing efforts.

 

There's such a big difference when you make something people want versus trying hard to convince them to buy what you've made. When you reach product-market fit, selling becomes easy and your customers become your best ambassadors. It's almost as if you could sit back and relax.

 

With The Value Mix, you will discover the joy of creating products that resonate deeply with your audience.

 

WHAT'S INSIDE THE BOOK

 

In this book, you will learn:

✓ How to master empathetic user research to uncover deep insights about customer needs and preferences
✓ A proven framework to decode what your customers really want and why
✓ How to create journey maps to design your value proposition from a user-first perspective
✓ A technique to identify who are your real competitors and how you can win over them
✓ How to articulate your product's unique value in a way that engages your audience, sparking their interest and desire
✓ What it takes to unlock the power of storytelling to elevate your product's appeal, crafting narratives that inspire and attract by highlighting the impact of your product

 

This book is crafted for entrepreneurs, designers, and product managers seeking to bridge the gap between a good starter idea and a great product.

 

LOOKING TO GROW YOUR BUSINESS?

 

Acting as the perfect companion to the lean startup methodology, the design thinking process, and customer development research, The Value Mix equips you with that additional edge, enabling you to succeed in value proposition design.

 

Get The Value Mix now and unlock the secret to creating products that people want to buy!

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

 

Since 2016, Guerric de Ternay has led innovation projects at ?What If! part of Accenture Innovation, where he helps Fortune 500 companies spot opportunities for growth and invent new products and services.

 

Guerric de Ternay is the founder of GoudronBlanc, a menswear brand that makes great T-shirts that men love to wear.

 

Since 2016, he has led innovation projects at ?What If! part of Accenture Innovation, where he helps Fortune 500 companies spot opportunities for growth and invent new products and services.

 

In 2018, he published The Value Mix, a book about creating products that people want, and he released a new edition in 2021. A year later, he published a second book called The Opportunity Lenses, which focuses on using foresight thinking to identify the most promising market opportunities to grow a business. Then, in 2024, Guerric published The Inspiring Team Lead with the ambition to help team leads and aspiring managers to build a positive team dynamic and inspire their team members to achieve unparalleled success.

 

A graduate of London Business School, Guerric also went to law school in Paris. He has been a guest lecturer at top business schools (incl. UCL, Princeton, University of Tartu, Condé Nast College of Fashion & Design).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Guerric de Ternay
• Release date: Jan 10, 2019
• ISBN: 9781386074649

Guerric de Ternay

Guerric de Ternay is the founder of GoudronBlanc, a menswear brand that makes great T-shirts that men love to wear. Since 2016, he has also led innovation projects at ?What If! part of Accenture Innovation, where he helps Fortune 500 companies spot opportunities for growth and invent new products and services. In 2018, he published The Value Mix, a book about creating products that people want, and he released a new edition in 2021. A year later, he published a second book called The Opportunity Lenses, which focuses on using foresight thinking to identify the most promising market opportunities to grow a business. Then, in 2024, Guerric published The Inspiring Team Lead with the ambition to help team leads and aspiring managers to build a positive team dynamic and inspire their team members to achieve unparalleled success. A graduate of London Business School, Guerric also went to law school in Paris. He has been a guest lecturer at top business schools (incl. UCL, Princeton, University of Tartu, Condé Nast College of Fashion & Design). Find out more about his latest reflections at Guerric.co.uk

Book preview

For those who shake up things, challenge the status quo, and make cool stuff happen.

Acknowledgements

A massive thank you to Ségolène and Amaury for always helping me with everything I do!

Big big thanks to María, Manu, Oskar, Patricia, Alex, Kirsten, Olli, and Toby for their constant support and the endless crazy chats about life, creativity, and innovation!

New Edition

The Value Mix was first published in 2018 on Leanpub and in 2019 on Amazon. A few years later, I still believe that the framework presented in the book can significantly help businesses create value for their audience by launching bolder, more meaningful propositions.

I wanted to update the content to add more examples, clarify some explanations, and prompt you to action with the key questions you’ll find at the end of each chapter.

Throughout the book, I refer to you as the person responsible for marketing and innovation in the company. But over the years, I realised that many readers are also consultants, students, and investors. This shows how universal the topic of creating new value propositions is.

I hope you enjoy this new edition of the book.

Introduction

It’s difficult to create a product that people really want to buy and use. There’s no silver bullet to success. It’s hard work because there’s lots of uncertainty.

Those who do this for a living know that.

Fortunately, over the past two decades, the management literature has equipped us with better ways to create new products, such as:

Customer centricity. Design thinking and customer development are two approaches that encourage us to build products for potential customers rather than trying to find customers for new products;

Iterative development. The lean startup methodology pushes us to apply the scientific method and pursue continuous learning and product iteration to create better products.

But, we are still missing a way to organise the information and insight we gather about our customers to clearly define what they need and want.

To help you develop successful products and services, you need a framework that:

Allows you to gain a deep understanding of what value means for your customers;

Gives you a shared language to align with your team on a strategy for the new products and services that you will launch.

This framework must be as accurate as possible, by capturing enough nuances to reflect the reality of our world. But it also needs to be practical enough so it can be used by anyone in your company who is involved in the process of launching new products and services.

Going beyond a limiting framework

Under the pressure of growth and profit targets, most organisations focus too much on their commercial priorities and not enough on creating value for their customers and users.

Putting the people who buy and use your products and services at the centre of your new product development process sounds common sense. But this isn’t an intuitive behaviour. It seems that it’s easier for a company to be product-centric than human-centred.

The easy way to force a business to focus on their customers and users is to talk about finding a solution to a problem, i.e., your customers have problems and your product is the solution.

This framework, which comes from the world of engineering, does help. But it creates the limiting belief that innovation is about finding a solution to a problem. The problem-solution dichotomy works. But it doesn’t capture enough nuances. This framework limits the scope of value creation. It misses the fact that people do not just buy a solution. They also buy brands, stories, emotional benefits, and experiences.

Solving a problem isn’t the only way to create value for your customers. What people perceive as value isn’t just functional. It

Reviews for The Value Mix

[Ashley Mo · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Must read book to understand how to deliver value in a deeper level