Writing a Value Proposition That Survives the Page

In 1988 two McKinsey consultants, Michael Lanning and Edward Michaels, wrote a staff paper called "A Business Is a Value Delivery System." Its argument was that a company should choose, for each customer group, a clear set of benefits and the approximate price it would charge for them, and then organize everything it did around delivering that choice. They called it the value proposition. In their use it was a decision made inside the company. Most people now meet the term as the headline on a homepage, which is where the original decision gets lost.

What a value proposition is

A value proposition states which customers you serve, what they get from you, and why that beats what they use today. The third part is the one teams leave out. "Save time on scheduling" describes a benefit, but every scheduling tool on the market could claim it, so it doesn't tell a buyer why to choose yours.

Two things follow from Lanning and Michaels's version. A value proposition belongs to a segment: a product with three kinds of customer may need three of them. And it is a promise the product has to keep. If the support, the onboarding and the pricing don't deliver what the statement says, the statement is a claim, and customers find out within weeks.

The written statement and the page are separate artifacts. The statement is for the team, so it can be long and plain, and it should name the competitor. The page is for a stranger who will give it a few seconds. Most of the work in this article is getting the first one right and then carrying it into the second without losing the specific part.

Three ways to write one

In a 2006 Harvard Business Review article on business markets, James Anderson, James Narus and Wouter van Rossum sorted the customer value propositions they found into three kinds.

The first lists all benefits: everything the offering does for the customer. It is the easiest to write and the least useful, because many of those benefits are ones competitors also provide.

The second lists favorable points of difference: everything the offering does better than the next best alternative. That is an improvement, but it assumes the customer values each of those differences, and the supplier often can't tell which ones they do.

The third, which the authors recommend, is a resonating focus: the one or two points of difference that matter most to the customer, stated with evidence of their value. It takes customer research to write, because you need to know which differences the buyer would pay for.

Most homepage feature grids are written in the first style.

The Value Proposition Canvas

Alexander Osterwalder and his co-authors set out the Value Proposition Canvas in Value Proposition Design (2014). It zooms into two blocks of the business model canvas, customer segments and value propositions, and splits each into three parts.

The customer profile, drawn as a circle, holds the customer's jobs (what they are trying to get done, including social and emotional jobs), their pains (what goes wrong, costs too much or worries them while doing those jobs) and their gains (the outcomes they want, including ones they would be pleased by but don't expect). The value map, drawn as a square, holds the products and services you offer, the pain relievers that address specific pains, and the gain creators that produce specific gains.

You fill in the customer side first, from evidence. User interviews, support tickets and the reasons people give when they cancel are the usual sources, and a persona built from that research can stand in for the segment. Then rank the pains and gains by how much they matter to the customer, and only then draw the value map against them. The canvas calls the result fit: the value map addresses the jobs, pains and gains that rank highest. A value map full of features that line up with low-ranked pains is the canvas version of the all-benefits list.

A shift-swap app, worked through

Take a hypothetical app for independent restaurants with 10 to 40 hourly staff. When a server can't work a shift, they post it in the app, colleagues trained for that role can claim it, and the manager approves the swap or sets a rule to approve it automatically. The rota updates when the swap is approved.

Customer jobs. For the manager: keep every shift covered with someone qualified, and keep labor costs inside the week's budget.

Pains. Swap requests arrive as late-night texts. Staff agree swaps between themselves in a group chat and the manager finds out when the wrong person turns up. A cook covers a bar shift they aren't trained for. Ranked by the managers in this hypothetical research, the second pain matters most, because it causes the no-shows.

Gains. A day off without the phone ringing. Knowing on Monday that Saturday is covered.

Value map. The product is the app and the rota inside it. Its pain relievers: every swap goes through the app, so the manager sees it before the shift (the top pain), and only staff trained for the role can claim a shift (the untrained-cover pain). Its gain creators: the rota updates itself on approval, and auto-approve rules mean a routine swap needs no reply on a day off.

Geoffrey Moore's positioning template from Crossing the Chasm turns this into a statement:

For managers of independent restaurants whose staff swap shifts in group chats, [the app] is a shift-swap tool that lets trained colleagues claim an open shift and updates the rota when you approve it. Unlike a group chat, it only offers the shift to people qualified to work it, and the rota is always the current one.

Check it against the canvas. The statement's customer clause names the highest-ranked pain (swaps agreed in a group chat the manager doesn't see), and the "unlike" sentence covers it plus the untrained-cover pain. The late-night texts and the labor budget are left out: they ranked lower, and a resonating focus keeps only the top one or two.

Value proposition, positioning, slogan, USP and mission

Term	What it says	Who it's for	Where it lives
Value proposition	What a segment gets and why that beats their alternative	The team, then customers	Strategy docs, then the page
Positioning statement	Which category you compete in and how you differ inside it	The team	Internal briefs
Unique selling proposition (USP)	One claim no competitor makes	Advertising audiences	Ads, packaging
Slogan or tagline	A short, memorable line for the brand	Everyone	Logo lockups, campaigns
Mission statement	Why the company exists	Employees, investors	About pages, decks

The USP comes from Rosser Reeves, whose 1961 book Reality in Advertising argued that each ad should make one proposition the competition did not or could not offer. A value proposition can contain a USP, but it also has to name the customer, which an advertising claim can skip.

Headline, subheadline and proof on the page

On the page, split the statement into three parts.

The headline carries the outcome the customer cares about most, in the customer's own words. For the shift-swap app that might be "Know who's working Saturday." The subheadline says how: "Staff swap shifts in the app, only with people trained for the role, and your rota updates when you approve." The proof comes next: a screenshot of an approved swap and the updated rota, the price, and, once the product has customers who agree to it, a named quote from one of them. Put the call to action beside the proof, with one primary action on the page.

The statement gets lost on the way to the page in a few predictable ways. Someone in the review asks for a headline that covers every segment, and "Know who's working Saturday" becomes "The all-in-one workforce platform for hospitality," which names a category and drops the difference. A second feature gets its own block above the screenshot, then a third, and the page turns back into the all-benefits list. The specific claim moves into the subheadline and then below the first screen. Each of these edits looks reasonable in a meeting. Keeping the written statement next to the page draft during review gives the team something to check each one against.

The wording also needs to match how customers describe the problem. If restaurant managers call it "the rota" and the page says "workforce scheduling," readers have to translate before they can agree. Copy the nouns from interview transcripts and support tickets, and check them against the product's tone of voice so the page sounds like the product people will use afterwards.

Testing whether it reached the visitor

The useful test is whether a stranger can say back who the product is for and what it does differently.

A five-second test shows a participant the page for five seconds, hides it, and asks what the product does, who it is for, and what they remember. Run it with people from the target segment. If they answer "some kind of scheduling software," the headline names the category and not the difference. If they remember the screenshot but not the claim, the proof is doing the work and the headline isn't.

A restatement question at the end of a usability test goes further: "How would you describe this to another manager?" Compare the answer to the written statement, clause by clause: customer, benefit, alternative.

Sales calls and support tickets give a slower reading. If prospects keep asking a question the page should have answered ("Does it work if my cooks don't have smartphones?"), the page is missing a fact they need before they'll believe the claim. If new customers keep cancelling for a reason the value proposition promised to fix, the problem is in the product or the segment, and no headline change will solve it.

When traffic allows, headline variants can be A/B tested against sign-ups. Judge the result on activated customers as well as sign-ups, because a broad headline can bring in more people who were never in the segment.

Value proposition FAQ

What is a value proposition in simple terms?

A value proposition is a statement of who your product is for, what they get from it, and why that is better than what they use now. Companies write it for a specific customer segment.

Who came up with the value proposition?

Michael Lanning and Edward Michaels introduced the term in a 1988 McKinsey staff paper, "A Business Is a Value Delivery System." Lanning developed it further in Delivering Profitable Value (1998).

What is a unique value proposition?

A unique value proposition, or UVP, is a value proposition that states a benefit no competitor offers. The term is common in landing-page and marketing writing and borrows from Rosser Reeves's unique selling proposition.

How long should a value proposition be?

The internal statement can run to two or three sentences, as long as it names the customer, the benefit and the alternative. On the page, the headline usually carries one idea in under ten words, and the subheadline carries the rest.

What is a customer value proposition?

It is the same idea seen from the buyer's side. The phrase is common in business-to-business marketing, where Anderson, Narus and van Rossum's Harvard Business Review article used it to argue for stating the few differences a customer values most, with evidence.

Can a product have more than one value proposition?

Yes, one for each segment it serves. A shift-swap app sold to restaurant managers and to the staff who use it daily needs one value proposition for each, and each needs its own page or section.

More on product strategy, research methods and the frameworks product teams use to decide what to build: the product insights hub.

Sources: Lanning, M. J. & Michaels, E. G. (1988), "A Business Is a Value Delivery System," McKinsey staff paper · Anderson, J. C., Narus, J. A. & van Rossum, W. (2006), "Customer Value Propositions in Business Markets," Harvard Business Review · Osterwalder, A., Pigneur, Y., Bernarda, G. & Smith, A. (2014), Value Proposition Design · Moore, G. A. (1991), Crossing the Chasm · Reeves, R. (1961), Reality in Advertising.