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A collection of article and ideas that help Smart Marketers to become Smarter
Marketing Canvas and Customers
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).
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
Marketing Canvas - Emotions
Today, differentiation comes through emotions and not functional features. Especially, if you look at it from the Experience Economy (from Gilmore and Pine) [1]. Do you know if you deliver the right emotional features? Can you leverage more the emotional dimensions in your value proposition for creating value? Answering yes means that you can create extra value through the emotional dimension of your value proposition
Last update: 06/11/2021
In a nutshell
The Emotions sub-dimension in the Marketing Canvas highlights the emotional benefits that define your value proposition. While functional benefits address practical needs, emotional benefits resonate with customers on a deeper level, fostering loyalty and long-term connections. A compelling emotional value proposition reflects your brand’s purpose, sets you apart from competitors, and aligns with evolving societal priorities like sustainability.
For example, a company like Green Clean might offer emotional benefits such as “peace of mind knowing your home is safe for your family and the planet.” This emotional resonance reinforces customer trust and loyalty, beyond the functional benefits of cleaning performance.
Introduction
The Emotions sub-dimension in the Marketing Canvas addresses the feelings and experiences customers associate with your value proposition. It explores how your brand elicits positive emotions, builds trust, and creates a lasting impact that goes beyond the product or service itself.
By understanding and delivering emotional benefits, brands can establish stronger connections with their target audience, inspire advocacy, and differentiate themselves in competitive markets.
What are emotional benefits?
Emotional benefits represent the intangible value customers derive from engaging with your brand. These benefits might include feelings of security, joy, pride, or belonging. Emotional benefits often serve as the deciding factor when customers choose between similar products or services.
For example:
Core Emotional Benefits: Address universal customer feelings such as trust or confidence.
Differentiating Emotional Benefits: Provide unique experiences or feelings that set your brand apart.
Unique Emotional Benefit: Create a singular emotional reason that makes your offering the preferred choice.
Green Clean’s emotional benefits might include:
Core Emotional Benefit: Trust in the safety and effectiveness of the product.
Differentiating Emotional Benefit: Pride in supporting a sustainable brand.
Unique Emotional Benefit: Peace of mind from creating a healthier, toxin-free home for loved ones.
Emotions: an in-depth perspective
To craft a powerful emotional value proposition, businesses must:
Meet Basic Expectations: Deliver on the emotional benefits expected within the category.
Differentiate Through Experiences: Offer unique emotional connections that competitors do not provide.
Focus on a Unique Emotional Appeal: Identify the single emotional benefit that defines your brand’s appeal.
Align with Purpose and Positioning: Ensure emotional benefits reflect the brand’s core mission and messaging.
Integrate Sustainability: Appeal to customers’ desire to make ethical and environmentally conscious choices.
For instance:
Alignment: Green Clean’s emotional benefits align with its eco-friendly mission, ensuring customers feel good about their choices.
Differentiation: By emphasizing its commitment to family health and environmental impact, Green Clean creates a unique emotional bond with its audience.
Sustainability: Features such as non-toxic ingredients and reusable packaging appeal to customers’ emotions tied to sustainability.
Translating emotions into action
To deliver emotional benefits effectively, brands must identify and consistently communicate the feelings they want to evoke across all customer touchpoints. Emotional benefits should be evident in marketing messages, customer experiences, and product interactions.
Questions to consider:
What emotional benefits are essential in your category, and how well do you deliver them?
How do your emotional benefits set your brand apart from competitors?
What is the unique emotional benefit that defines your value proposition?
Are your emotional benefits consistent with your brand purpose and positioning?
How do your emotional benefits reflect sustainability?
Statements for self-assessment
For a comprehensive evaluation of your understanding and application of the Emotions concept, rate your agreement with the following statements on a scale from -3 (completely disagree) to +3 (completely agree):
Your value proposition has all the core emotional benefits required by the category.
Your value proposition has few emotional benefits that set you apart from the competition.
Your value proposition has a unique emotional benefit that defines the single most reason for choosing you.
Your value proposition emotional benefits are consistent with your brand purpose and positioning.
Your value proposition has integrated sustainability in its emotional benefits.
Interpretation of the scores
Negative scores (-1 to -3): Negative scores indicate that your value proposition lacks clarity or fails to address the emotional benefits that customers expect. This may lead to weak differentiation, limited customer loyalty, and missed opportunities to create meaningful connections.
A score of zero (0): A neutral score reflects uncertainty or incomplete articulation of emotional benefits. While some benefits may exist, they lack depth, uniqueness, or alignment with your brand purpose. Further development and integration are needed to create a compelling emotional value proposition.
Positive scores (+1 to +3): Positive scores suggest that your emotional benefits are well-defined, unique, and consistently aligned with your brand purpose and sustainability goals. These benefits foster customer loyalty, emotional connections, and advocacy, strengthening your value proposition.
Case study: Green clean’s emotional benefits
Misaligned understanding (-3, -2, -1): Green Clean focuses only on functional benefits, failing to address the emotional needs of its customers. This oversight leads to weak emotional connections and limited differentiation, as customers do not feel a unique or lasting bond with the brand.
Surface understanding (0): Green Clean recognizes the importance of emotional benefits but lacks a cohesive strategy to articulate and deliver them. While customers may appreciate the eco-friendly mission, the emotional connection remains superficial and does not strongly influence their loyalty or advocacy.
Deep understanding (+1, +2, +3): Green Clean offers a well-defined emotional value proposition. Customers feel peace of mind knowing their cleaning products are safe and sustainable, pride in supporting an eco-conscious brand, and joy in contributing to a healthier environment. These emotional benefits align with the brand’s purpose and create a loyal customer base that advocates for the brand’s mission.
Conclusion
The Emotions sub-dimension is vital for creating value propositions that resonate deeply with customers. By delivering core emotional benefits, differentiating through unique experiences, and aligning these benefits with brand purpose and sustainability, businesses can build trust, foster loyalty, and inspire advocacy. A strong emotional value proposition complements functional benefits, making the overall offering more compelling and memorable.
Read Next
How to price your product? Read Marketing Canvas and Pricing
Sources
Market and Economic Value, Laurent Bouty, https://laurentbouty.com/blog/2019/marketing-canvas-market-and-economic-value
Harvard Business Review, 2015, The new science of customer emotions
Harvard Business Review, 2018, The B2B elements of Value
Marketing Journal, 2018, The elements of Value
More on the Marketing Canvas
Marketing Canvas by Laurent Bouty
Marketing Canvas - Aspirations
Aspirations in the Marketing Canvas help businesses uncover the deeper, often emotional and social goals that customers strive to fulfill through their product or service. Aspirations move beyond functional needs and focus on the personal growth, societal impact, and environmental contribution that customers seek. Identifying these aspirations enables businesses to create stronger emotional connections and long-term relationships with their audience.
Last edit: 20/10/2024: The final edits focus on reviewing the scoring system and refining the Green Clean example.
In a nutshell
Aspirations in the Marketing Canvas help businesses uncover the deeper, often emotional and social goals that customers strive to fulfill through their product or service. Aspirations move beyond functional needs and focus on the personal growth, societal impact, and environmental contribution that customers seek. Identifying these aspirations enables businesses to create stronger emotional connections and long-term relationships with their audience.
For example, Green Clean customers likely aspire to more than just maintaining a clean home. They may also want to live a healthier life, reduce their environmental footprint, and contribute positively to their community. By understanding these aspirations, Green Clean can better align its marketing and service strategies with the values that resonate most with its customers.
In the Marketing Canvas
The Marketing Canvas is a powerful tool for entrepreneurs and non-marketers to build a robust marketing strategy. It consists of six meta-dimensions, each with four sub-dimensions, for a total of 24 sub-dimensions defining your Marketing Strategy. One of these sub-dimensions is ASPIRATIONS, which falls under the CUSTOMER meta-dimension.
Introduction
The Aspirations sub-dimension is part of the Customer category within the Marketing Canvas. It focuses on understanding the personal, societal, and environmental aspirations that customers have when interacting with a product or service. These aspirations often reflect the desire to improve themselves, their community, or the world around them.
While Jobs To Be Done helps identify what customers aim to accomplish in the short term, Aspirations delve into the long-term goals and ideal visions that shape their decisions.
The importance of defining Marketing aspirations
Aspirations are the personal dreams, social causes, and environmental goals that drive customers' choices. They represent the deeper values and long-term visions customers hold for themselves and the world. Unlike functional needs, aspirations are often intangible but highly influential in shaping behavior.
For example, Green Clean’s customers may aspire to:
Improve their health by maintaining a safe, non-toxic home environment.
Support environmental sustainability by reducing waste and using eco-friendly products.
Be role models in their community by setting a positive example of environmental responsibility.
These aspirations connect to broader societal and environmental movements, giving brands like Green Clean a pathway to build meaningful connections with their customers.
Aspirations: an in-depth perspective
Customers often seek products or services that align with their broader goals for personal growth, societal impact, or environmental contribution. They look for solutions that help them achieve not only immediate functional needs but also their vision for a better self or a better world.
For example, customers using Green Clean might aspire to:
Live more sustainably by choosing eco-friendly products that align with their environmental values.
Contribute positively to society by promoting sustainability and setting an example for others, reflecting their societal values.
Improve their personal well-being by creating a healthy, toxin-free living space, aligned with their personal values.
Understanding these deeper aspirations helps businesses tailor their marketing and offerings to align with the customer’s long-term goals.
How the Marketing Canvas aligns aspirations and strategy
To effectively connect with customer aspirations, businesses need to focus on the emotional, societal, and environmental goals of their target audience. Understanding aspirations allows companies to align their strategies with their customers' vision for the future, building loyalty and fostering deeper relationships.
Questions to consider:
What personal aspirations do your customers have that align with their values?
How does your product or service help them contribute to society or the environment?
How can your marketing reflect their vision for personal growth or impact on the world?
Aspirationals are defined by their love of shopping, desire for responsible consumption, and their trust in brands to act in the best interest of society [1]
Examples
Example 1: Patagonia
Patagonia, the outdoor clothing and gear company, has an audience whose aspirations go beyond just having quality outdoor clothing. Their customers aspire to protect the environment, which is why Patagonia's commitment to sustainability, ethical sourcing, and environmental activism resonates with them. Patagonia's alignment with these aspirations has helped them cultivate a highly loyal customer base.
Example 2: Tesla
Tesla's customers are not just buying a car; they are buying into a vision of a sustainable, technologically advanced future. Customers' aspirations here include reducing their carbon footprint, being part of cutting-edge technology, and the status associated with owning a Tesla. Elon Musk understood these aspirations and built Tesla's brand around them.
Example 3: Dove
Dove, a personal care brand, understood that their customers aspired to real, authentic beauty rather than the unattainable standards often portrayed in the media. Their "Real Beauty" campaign resonated deeply with customers worldwide, helping the brand build a strong emotional connection with its audience.
Statements for self-assessment
For a comprehensive evaluation of your understanding and application of the Aspirations concept, rate your agreement with the following statements on a scale from -3 (completely disagree) to +3 (completely agree):
You have clearly identified consumers' aspirations for improving themselves (personal values).
You have clearly identified consumers' aspirations for improving the world around them (societal values).
You have clearly identified consumers' aspirations for improving the world around them (environmental values).
Interpretation of the scores
Negative scores (-1 to -3): A negative score suggests that you disagree or strongly disagree with the statement, meaning you lack a solid understanding of your customers' aspirations, whether they are personal, societal, or environmental. This could result in your marketing and offerings being out of sync with the emotional and values-driven goals of your audience, weakening brand loyalty and connection.
A score of zero (0): A neutral score reflects uncertainty or only a surface-level understanding of your customers’ aspirations. You may recognize that aspirations exist but do not fully grasp how these emotional, societal, or environmental goals influence customer behavior. Further exploration is needed to deepen your understanding of their long-term aspirations.
Positive scores (+1 to +3): Positive scores indicate agreement with the statements, meaning you have a strong understanding of your customers' personal, societal, and environmental aspirations. You recognize how these aspirations shape decision-making and can align your product and marketing strategies with their broader goals. This deeper understanding helps you build a stronger emotional connection with your customers and reinforce their loyalty to your brand.
Case study: Green Clean's aspirations
Misaligned understanding (-3, -2, -1): Green Clean focuses only on functional needs (cleaning services) and does not recognize its customers' aspirations for personal, societal, or environmental improvement. By ignoring these deeper aspirations, Green Clean risks losing customers who value sustainability and seek brands that reflect their broader goals for positive change.
Surface understanding (0): Green Clean acknowledges that its customers have aspirations, such as wanting eco-friendly products, but it does not fully understand the emotional significance behind these aspirations. The company might see environmental responsibility as a secondary factor, without realizing how central it is to the customer's personal, societal, and environmental values. This limits their ability to connect deeply with their customers.
Deep understanding (+1, +2, +3): Green Clean fully understands its customers' aspirations for personal well-being, societal contribution, and environmental responsibility. The company aligns its services and marketing strategies with these aspirations by offering eco-friendly solutions, promoting sustainability, and helping customers achieve their vision for a healthier, more sustainable lifestyle. This deep understanding strengthens the emotional bond between Green Clean and its customers, making the brand a trusted partner in their long-term journey.
Sources
https://blog.globalwebindex.com/trends/why-aspirational-consumers-matter/
Report: https://globescan.com/five-human-aspirations-and-the-future-of-brands/
"Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action" by Simon Sinek
"Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen" by Donald Miller
