I attended the talk organised by the Fellowship of Inventors last sat. Finally found some time, and not to mention the title of the talk sounded like something I had to attend. "How to build a viable business" Pratap Nambiar. The key takeaway, value proposition, your whole business and the model and how you do it is about value proposition. How to best execute and bring out your value proposition?

Question is so what is value proposition? And what is a good value proposition. We didn't really talk about it much but I'm under the impression that he prefers to move companies into customised offerings and upmarket branding. So better margins in whatever product/service you are offering.

What is value proposition? Quick check on wikipedia reveals "customer value proposition consists of the sum total of benefits which a vendor promises that a customer will receive in return for the customer's associated payment (or other value-transfer).

Accordingly, a customer can evaluate a company's value-proposition on two broad dimensions with multiple subsets:

1. relative performance: what the customer gets from the vendor relative to a competitor's offering;
2. price: which consists of the payment the customer makes to acquire the product or service; plus the access cost

The vendor-company's marketing and sales efforts offer a customer value proposition; the vendor-company's delivery and customer-service processes then fulfill that value-proposition."

Think about what you are offering to the customer and what the customer wants. The closer the match of your value proposition to the customer's needs, the easier a sale is made, and the better a price.

Coming back in the area of web marketing for your business? How much are you willing to pay and what do you expect to get out of the amount that is paid? Feel free to share your views.