Planet earth: Building our value proposition

The prospect of building a value proposition can be daunting. You may be introduced to a new complex and multi-faceted business, operating in an equally complex and multi-faceted sector.

But as consultants, we have complete belief in our processes. No matter the size, sector or market, the process of building a robust value proposition requires you to follow the same fundamental steps.

So let’s walk through a thought experiment.

Your client, a galactic private equity fund operating in the Andromeda galaxy, has just acquired a new planet: Planet Earth.

It has major growth aspirations and needs support repositioning Planet Earth.

To do this effectively, you need to undertake a process of Discovery and Definition.

Unlocking foundational insights

Let’s approach this as we would with any client brief to help us understand Earth’s value proposition as a planet.

Step One: Qualitative Assessment

First, we need to understand how the current brand is perceived.

• What does it stand for?
• How does it deliver value?
• What attributes and qualities are associated with it?

We need a diverse and representative sample size aligned with ISO 20252’s research standards. We need to speak with its operators (the business) and its users (the customers).

This provides us an inside out and outside-in view of the business.

This process of insight generation will allow us to understand the business through an objective, customer-centric lens. What are their needs, wants and motivations and how is Planet Earth meeting these.

Step Two: Business analysis

Now we need to delve into some desk research to conduct an objective business assessment. We need to understand what macro-environmental factors might impact its performance.

We will then audit the planet (its workforce, process products and services), and start to map out its core strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.

In tandem, we will engage our research partners to build a customer segmentation model, identifying trends and behaviours of our core customer groups

This exercise will give us clear direction about where we can credibly lead, what we obstacles we should avoid and who the priority audiences are.

Step Three: Competitor Mapping

We will then look to map the market alternatives. Here we will need to be focused. It’s counterproductive to map every planet in our galaxy. Instead, we will focus on our immediate and neighbouring solar systems.

We will home in on our direct planetary competitors, the leading planetary players and the new challenger planets, and assess their business and brand.

We can then assess where our business fits into this mix. How are we similar or different? And is there a new, untapped brand territory we could occupy?

Shaping our brand proposition

With a solid base of objective data and insights to work from, we can then look to construct our value proposition.

So, what has our research uncovered:

• Earth primarily serves a core audience of a species called homo sapiens. This market segment is ever-growing in size, but is customer with waning brand loyalty and investment.
• As a business, there is infinitesimal market growth and diversification potential, but limited market demand across the overall galaxy. This is compounded by limited brand awareness and mixed brand perceptions. Earth faces major reputational baggage, perceived as fractious, volatile and fragmented proposition. This market perception extends back millennia but has notably spiked over the last 500 years.
• There are legitimate weaknesses that need to be looked at. Some of these relate to its brand and some to its operating model.
• Operating model: Sustainability is the most visible fault line. Earth operates as though its resources are infinite, despite mounting evidence to the contrary. Short-term gain routinely outweighs long-term viability. From a strategic standpoint, this introduces risk and compromises its investment narrative.
• Brand: Perhaps most critically, Earth has struggled to define what it stands for. The enterprise has pushed a futurist position, promising a better tomorrow. But this brand narrative has both been inconsistently employed across its operational footprint, or its business practices have actively undermined this current proposition – creating a major credibility gap amongst its core customer base.

Planet earth offers two core products…

– Environment (Ecosystem): abundant, self-renewing, and improbably diverse. It boasts an atmosphere that sustains life rather than resists it. Its environment generates energy, materials and beauty without instruction.

– Human thought (Processing powered of its flagship species): This is a planet powered by imagination. Humans create stories, systems, technologies and cultures at speed. Ideas spread faster than any known resource. Progress compounds. Failure is frequent, but rarely final.

• Planet Earth pales in comparison to its immediate alternative by various metrics: size, lunar volume, strategic distance from the sun. But current market analysis suggests that Earth is the only planet in immediate solar systems to support complex cellular life.

These inputs then serve as the evidence and rationale for our value proposition.

Brand Promise: Constant evolution

​Earth offers life — not just the ability to survive, but the conditions to evolve. It’s a self-sustaining system that produces food, energy, culture and conflict in equal measure. Nothing here is finished; we are still evolving. Species adapt, societies reorganise, technologies reinvent.

Earth isn’t a static asset. It’s a living platform. A fertile and collaborative partner growth and change.

Brand Positioning: Human-powered potential

Plenty of planets may support some type of microbial life. But no other than organically support human life, and by extension, human thought.

Homo sapiens are earth’s most powerful differentiator. Their processing systems are uniquely complex. They can contain multitudes at any given time: logic and belief, destruction and creation, individuality and collective identity.

​The human brain makes us distinctly valuable to our customers and potential future investors.

What can we learn from this

This thought experiment isn’t really about extraterrestrials.

It’s about the power of a robust methodology and objective distance.

When you step far enough away, clarity follows. Emotion fades. Assumptions loosen. What remains is what actually matters: your value proposition — what you offer, why it’s valuable, and whether your story holds up under scrutiny.

Seen from the outside, Earth is flawed and inconsistent. But when you delve beneath the surface, you uncover that this is its strength. It’s alive with possibility.

At The Team, we don’t rebrand planets, but we do work with a diverse portfolio of clients who demand objective insight and inventive strategy to help shape the future direction of their business.