It’s also…

…the experience of receiving the drill, reading the packaging, opening the box, learning how to use it, charging it, changing bits, childproofing it, accidentally dropping it on the floor and (maybe) having to repair it.

Every moment of a customer’s journey has the potential to delight or frustrate, to win a fan or lose a customer.

Experience-Driven Value Creation is about turning these moments into reasons why your brand becomes your customers‘ favourite.

Set your company apart from ‚the rest‘.

Create New Value
Experience-Driven Value Creation (EDVC) is a strategic approach for identifying and capturing new value creation opportunities that set you apart and for which customers are willing to pay more.

Transform Pain Points
EDVC focuses on identifying customer frustrations and envisioning ideal experiences as the basis for developing differentiated products, services and touchpoints that go beyond standard offerings.

Reduce Complexity
EDVC blends the core principles of branding, strategic design and human-centred innovation into a lean, actionable process tailored to the realities of small and midsize businesses.

Shrinking Market Gravity

Caught between level-matching fellow SMEs, price-cutting low-cost providers and major brands raising customer expectations, small and mid-sized companies are steadily losing market gravity.

How to Provide Differentiated Value?

To thrive, SMEs must find ways to go beyond delivering the same value as everyone else and simply keeping up with industry trends – they must offer customers relevant value they can’t get anywhere else.

Aiming for Delight

Experiences shape every purchase decision, guiding customers from identifying a need to evaluating a solution. Expectations serve as the baseline for evaluating these experiences, leading to three possible outcomes:

1. frustration (if expectations aren’t met)
2. adequacy (if they are met)
3. delight (if they are exceeded)

These perceptions influence whether customers engage, stay or leave.

EDVC Is About

Identifying opportunities to minimize frustration, exceed adequacy and achieve delight at as many moments in the customer journey as possible.

„How far are we from delivering the best possible experience to our customers, and how can we use this gap as a starting point for creating differentiated and relevant value?“

Leveraging all value drivers

A company can provide value in three ways. By:

• What a company does:
  Refers to the enabling products, services and touchpoints
• How a company does it:
  Refers to the specific way solutions are executed and the benefits this brings
• Why a company matters:
  Refers to the bigger meaning behind a company’s actions and existence

Customers evaluate all three value drivers at every stage of their journey.

Shaping a specific experience and value perception.

The Challenge

Finding ways to leverage the three value drivers differently from your competitors at key moments in the customer journey to deliver a delightful experience.

Key One – Ideal Customer Focus

Not every potential customer is the right customer, as different customers prioritise different Whats, Hows and Whys. To become the one, companies must define who they want to stand out for – ideally, those for whom they can create the most value and who best align with their business model and capabilities. The more focused, the clearer the requirements for the right What, How and Why.

Key Two – The Value Creation Triad

Step 1 – Identity Definition

Define the building blocks of your EDVC strategy.

Brand Positioning

Define your organisation’s specific perspective. Why does it exist and what change does it seek to make?

Ideal Customer Definition

Who exactly is your organisation trying to help? Which customer benefits most from what you do?

Relevance Assessment

Objectively assess how differentiated your current offering is. Define a starting point and a destination.

Step 2 – CX Assessment

Identify gaps between customer expectations and value delivery in all four experience dimensions of the journey to identify opportunities for improvement.

Journey Mapping
Map out the individual stages of each journey phase. List motives, thoughts and intentions at each given stage.

Expectation Assessment
Identify pain points and moments of frustration. Assess the customer’s expectation range, using competitive analysis, customer feedback and self-testing.

Value Delivery Rating
Assess where you fall short of, meet or exceed customer expectations. Benchmark against alternative solutions already available.

Identify Opportunities
Create a list of value creation opportunities. Where can frustrations be reduced, expectations met or even exceeded?

Imagine what the ideal experience could look like, considering your strategic building blocks.

Eliminate Frustrations
„It would be a less [negative experience] if it was (more) [comparative positive attribute] for the customer.“

Exceed Expectations
„The ideal experience would be when customers [action/feeling/outcome] without having to [current pain point].“

Inject Your Brand
„This experience feels [negative descriptor]. A brand like ours should provide an experience that feels/is [brandworthy descriptor].“

Step 4 – Value Driver Adjustment

Bring your experience-driven vision to life by looking through the lens of the Value Creation Triad.

A New What
What innovative solutions (products, services, touchpoints) can make the target experience happen?

A Better How
How should the solution be executed to deliver the target experience?

A Strong Why
How can this moment express our unique perspectives and qualities?