10 Pathways of Brand Innovation: How to Improve the "value proposition"

There are many roads a brand can take to innovate on value. Often these will be specific to a product market or customer environment. A marketer of ophthalmics will work with different brand value equations than a provider of diagnostic services, or a developer of patient management software.

In his book What Customers Want: Using Outcome-Driven Innovation to Create Breakthrough Products and Services, Anthony Ulwick offers his useful baseline innovation methodologies.

In a global context, brand innovation can accomplish the following (often in combination):

1. Free the customer from current constraints of the market
2. Enable the customer to do more with the product
3. Advance the context of the product
4. Advance the context of the customer
5. Through the brand, increase the customer’s proactive powers
6. Leverage brand experience into customer experience
7. Incorporate the customer into the innovation process
8. Leverage the brand platform into a customer platform
9. Unlock the customer’s creative powers
10. Create a community that supports the customer

Consider the brand you’re working on right now....which path could you take to improve the "value proposition"?