The method, made playable.
Five interactive tools built straight from the book. Bring your own value proposition and run it through each one. No sign-up, nothing saved, just the ideas in your hands.
The Formula, as a discipline
Set how many channels, values, promises and USPs you carry, and read whether you are focused or trying to be everything to everyone.
Interactive · The Formula as a discipline
one promise per channel · two channels at most
2 promises · 2 channels: one per channel
Textbook discipline
One promise per channel: clean, and exactly the norm.
This is the shape the method aims for. Trader Joe's runs one voice, one kind of store, a tight private-label value set and almost no advertising, and earns devotion rather than mere reach.
The 3P Contract Diagnostic
The thirty-second test. Are you irrelevant, weak, or simply 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.
Which Ocean? Detector
Six questions to read whether you are in a red, blue, or new ocean, and which arsenal you need.
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 Promise Builder
Assemble a promise from its five ingredients: clause, object, recipient, enforcer, conditions.
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…
The Value Stick
Widen the whole stick by raising willingness to pay, then decide who keeps the delight.
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.
Wins, losses, and autopsies: every case a framework in the wild.
The canonical value-led win: USP near nil, audience block devastating.
All four factors switched on at once, a category built without traditional advertising.
One proposition read under seven different lenses of the method.
A textbook new-ocean attempt: the category was named, but the market did not enter.
The recurring negative case: a 97.5% collapse when the promise lost its proof.
The autopsies: what happens when the frame changes and you improve inside the old one.
The author's own agency, dissected with its own tools. A method that refuses to be applied to itself is not a method.
A value proposition where the stance itself is the differentiator.
AI-assisted tools that run the full method on your strategy.
Beyond these playground toys, the Value Strategy platform turns the method into working software: assessment, benchmarking, design, and a capstone value strategy report. Ask me for early access.