Anthony W. Ulwick

DEFINE THE VALUE PROPOSITION

A number of years ago we worked with Coloplast’s wound care product team. More specifically, we focused on wound care nurses (the end users) whose Job-to-be-Done was “treat
a wound.” We used our Outcome-Based Segmentation methodology to reveal a segment of underserved nurses, and the findings resulted in a new value proposition that led to double-digit growth in less than six months. How did Coloplast achieve these results? To paraphrase hockey great Wayne Gretzky, Coloplast “skated to where the puck was going to be.”

At the time, all other wound care companies had built their value propositions around some variation of “we help wounds heal faster.” Coloplast realized that talking about speed of healing was akin to skating to where the puck had been. Sure, at some point in the past, wound care nurses had been underserved along that dimension and that value proposition had resonated with them. But those days were long gone.

When we conducted Outcome-Based Segmentation for Coloplast, we found a segment of wound care nurses whose top unmet needs had nothing to do with speed of healing.

Instead, 10 of their top 15 unmet needs—their desired outcomes—related to “making sure the wound doesn’t get worse.” It turns out that in many wound treatment situations, the patient unwittingly makes the wound worse, and avoiding those complications was a challenge for nurses. Coloplast realized that “preventing complications” was where the puck was going to be.
Coloplast went to market with its new wound care value proposition: “We prevent complications.” Without changing its products or its pricing—simply by focusing its messaging and sales efforts on nurses’ unmet outcomes—Coloplast achieved double-digit growth.

This is not an isolated incident. Our first success repositioning an existing product line was with Cordis Corporation back in 1992. Cordis experienced a 3-point increase in market share by aligning the strengths of its products with the unmet needs of the interventional cardiologist. In 2014, Arm & Hammer’s Animal Nutrition division realigned its value proposition and achieved a 30%- plus increase in year-to-year revenue.