The Buyer Utility Map
It’s probably been at least 10 years since I first read Blue Ocean Strategy. So when I picked up the book yesterday to write a Book Brief on it, I had to spend some time reacquainting myself with it. I shouldn’t be surprised that I rediscovered some gems that long ago had slipped away.
One of those is the Buyer Utility Map. Often when I tell the story of going from the corporate world into my first startup, I quip that I found out that there are these things called “customers” and they kinda matter. In the years since reading Blue Ocean Strategy I’ve once again been actively involved in the startup community, so tools that focus on the customer particularly resonate with me. I’ve been a big fan of the Value Proposition Canvas ever since I was introduced to it — I often tell startups I coach that this is the first tool they need to master. More recently, I’ve added the Customer Value Chain to my bag of tools.
In some ways, the Buyer Utility Map combines aspects of the Value Proposition Canvas and the Customer Value Chain, but as with the whole Blue Ocean approach, it starts by looking at industry priorities to identify gaps and opportunities. The Map is a 6x6 matrix with the Buyer Experience Cycle (roughly analogous to the Customer Value Chain) as the columns, and six utility levers (roughly representing the Value Proposition Canvas’ “pains” and “gains”) as the rows.
The book provides a series of questions that should be asked about each stage in the buyer experience cycle. How hard is it to find and purchase the product? How is the purchase experience? How long does it take to receive the product? How hard is it to unpack and install? Does the product require specific expertise or training? Are there not enough features or too many? How well does it work? If the product requires other products and services, are those easy to get and affordable? How easy and affordable is it to maintain the product? How easy and affordable is it to dispose of the product when no longer useful? Does it create environmental waste?
The utility levers are pretty self-explanatory, but the goal is to identify how those levers apply to each stage in the buyer experience cycle. Which combinations of utility and experience stage are the industry focused on today? Where are the biggest opportunities and pain points for customers? Are there non-customers that might become customers if issues currently ignored by the industry were to be addressed?
These are the kinds of questions that help uncover a differentiated strategy and, in the words of the authors, expand industry boundaries to create new blue ocean markets.
Isn’t it great to rediscover forgotten tools?
