A method you can operate, not just admire.
Four load-bearing frameworks, four principles underneath them, and a single formula that ties them together. Read each one, then use the interactive beside it on your own case.
The one page to keep
The Value Proposition Formula
VP = [ Channels × Core Values × Promise ] + USP
The single page Hoang would keep if he had to throw away the rest of the book. The distillate used the same way for startups and listed groups, for products and services, for B2C and B2B.
The block in square brackets is a multiplication, and that choice is the whole point: if any factor is zero, the result is zero. Perfect channels and a sparkling promise resting on no real value are worth nothing, with interest, because the empty promise gets paid for. Multiplication forces an honesty that addition forgives.
The USP sits after a plus sign, not inside the bracket. When you have it, it contributes raw value, but it is no longer the condition of success. Values are the sponge, promise is the filling, USP is the frosting.
Interactive · The Value Stick
Value created is the whole stick. Price only decides who keeps which part of it.
Raised by the value proposition: what the customer would gladly pay.
Your capture. Sits between cost and WTP.
Lowered by suppliers and operations, never the goal on its own.
Cost reduction can never be the objective on its own: it is cutting off your legs to weigh less. The strategist's work is to widen the whole stick by raising willingness to pay, then decide, deliberately, how much delight to leave on the customer's side of the line.
Premise · Promise · Proof
The 3P Framework
The three Ps missing from the marketing alphabet, arranged as a contract.
Marketing has a jungle of Ps, from Kotler's four to every consultant's later additions, all of them centered on the product. In all that abundance, nobody takes care of the most important thing: the promise.
The deep structure is a contract. The premise is the declaration of validity, the promise is the object, the proof is the resolution. Naming it a contract introduces what traditional marketing carefully removes: duties.
The thirty-second diagnostic, one failure mode per missing P: no premise and you are irrelevant; no promise and you are weak; no proof and you are not trusted.
Interactive · The 30-second diagnostic
A contract with three clauses. Miss one, and it names how you fail.
You are irrelevant, weak and not trusted. Every broken value proposition fails in at least one of these three ways. Naming which is the fastest diagnosis in the book.
Choose your arsenal by the playfield
The Three Oceans
Red needs a USP. Blue needs the whole formula. New needs the full 3P plus category design.
The most widespread strategic error is bringing blue-ocean weapons to a red-ocean war, or the reverse. The same value proposition does not work in every market, and the diagnosis is done per line of business, not per company.
Red ocean: competition within known rules, where a sharpened USP is enough. Blue ocean: uncontested space reached by redrawing the value curve, where you need the whole multiplicative block. New ocean: created, not found, requiring the full 3P plus category design.
The costliest mistake is misreading the ocean out of flattery. "We have no real competitors" is the most dangerous sentence in business.
Interactive · Which ocean?
0/6
1. When you lose a customer, where do they go?
2. Does the customer know how to evaluate you?
3. Is there already a budget line for what you sell?
4. How much explaining do you have to do?
5. Who names your category?
6. What is your price compared against?
Answer all six to read your ocean. Remember the most dangerous sentence in business: we have no real competitors.
The shortest path to value
Value to Market
Delivering benefits by prioritizing immediate value, minimizing delays, focusing on the smartest wins.
The Value Proposition is the strategy of the promise. The Go to Market is the mechanics of the launch. Value to Market is what connects them, the anti-dispersion discipline that carries designed value into the market's actual perception.
The number nobody expects is 6%: a Value to Market strategy should require six percent of the total project budget, spent upstream where every euro conditions all the others. Almost every failed project spent zero on the question "what value are we bringing, to whom, and how will they perceive it?"
Three phases: Envisioning (short, holds 80% of decisions), Strategy Design (the formula filled in for real), Engineering (the strategy translated into specs). Three steps, in order: build your assets, position yourself, craft a story.
Interactive · Anatomy of a promise
The trigger. The IF that switches the promise on.
The thing itself. What you actually do.
The target, not the whole market. Who it is truly for.
The distinctive adjective, self-reflected, never comparative.
The perimeter of fulfilment. A declaration and a boundary at once.
Your promise · 0/5 ingredients
A true contract, ingredient by ingredient…
Written in the discipline of Ray Dalio: rules you can reuse, test, and hand on.
Better is not different. Within a given frame, improvement produces increments; only a new frame produces leaps.