In a nutshell
When working on the Customers part of the Marketing Canvas, you are trying to identify relevant and actionable triggers (you can also call it insights) that you will try to leverage through the other dimensions of the canvas. We have 4 dimensions you can play with for identifying these triggers (JTBD, ASPIRATIONS, PAINS & GAINS, ENGAGEMENT). What matters at the end of this exercise is that you avoid fluffy (triggers), you have built a list of triggers, you have qualified them (functional or emotional), you have identified supporting evidence and you have rated the strength of each trigger.
In the Marketing Canvas
In the Marketing Canvas, we have identified 6 main categories for building your Marketing Strategy: Customers, Brand, Value Proposition, Journey, Conversation and Metrics. Each of these categories have 4 dimensions which means that a total of 24 dimensions (6 by 4) are defining your Marketing Strategy.
Customers is one of the 4 dimensions of the Metrics category. That category is composed of 4 dimensions.
How to use it?
What I have noticed during workshops is that people have difficulties to identify strong insights that could be used for building value propositions that rocks. They usually list insights that are very broad (even fluffy) like customers want quality (who doesn’t?) but could not describe what sort of quality customers are looking for. One example that could help you understand my point is the following:
When designing mobile phones, we know that these phones should be robust but what does it really mean. Glass manufacturer designed glass that could resist a drop from 10 meters but customers were looking for a phone that could resist multiple drops from 1 meter because it is what they are experiencing in real life. You see robustness could be very different!
When working on the 4 dimensions of CUSTOMERS, you can identify a list of triggers that could be functional (What the customer is expecting to get?) and emotional (What the customer is expecting to feel?). An interesting read on benefits/triggers is the article from the beloved brand web site (here).
I have not found a global list with all potential triggers (functional and emotional) that you could choose when working on a specific case. The most elaborated list I have found so far is the one developed by Bain Consulting for B2C and B2B. They have identified elements of value (30 for B2C and 40 for B2B) classified as functional, emotional, life-changing, and social impact.
In the Marketing Canvas, I have only considered 2 categories (functional and emotional), therefore if you are using Bain B2C triggers, you should consider emotional, life-changing and social impact as Emotional triggers.
What I also like in the Bain proposal is their B2B mapping which is something you don’t easily find. In the case of the B2B mapping, you should consider Table Stakes and Functional Values as Functional and Ease of doing business value, Individual value and inspirational value as Emotional for the Marketing Canvas method.
More on Bain can be found here: B2C elements of value and B2B elements of value.
Some Videos
Potential ideas
How to add intangible values to product?
Immediacy - priority access, immediate delivery
Personalization - tailored just for you
Interpretation - support and guidance
Authenticity - how can you be sure it is the real thing?
Accessibility - wherever, whenever
Embodiment - books, live music
Patronage - "paying simply because it feels good",
Findability - "When there are millions of books, millions of songs, millions of films, millions of applications, millions of everything requesting our attention — and most of it free — being found is valuable."
source: Wikipedia Attention Economy
Method
What you should do is the following:
Take each dimension and identify triggers that are either functional or emotional;
List evidence supporting each trigger;
Rate each trigger from weak to strong in the function of the importance of the customer (the more the customer is demonstrating that s.he is effectively in needs of this trigger through past behavior (doing more than saying), the stronger the trigger).
Take the top 10 triggers at the end of this exercise and complete the template below.
Template
Marketing Canvas Method - Customer Triggers Template
