5.4 Chapter Summary: Not All Value Is Created Equal

This chapter has been about categories of value. The reason that we seek to understand and “sort” value is that not all value is the same. And, as we will soon see, there are different growth strategies for different categories of value. To give a little prelude to this, consider that the key focus of both Porter’s framework on competitive advantage and the resource-based view of the firm can be framed as Area A strategies:

• Grow, strengthen, and defend Area A, our unique points-of-difference.

• However, by sorting value into the categories defined in the 3-Circle model, there are several other equally important strategies that might be pursued. These strategies include the following:

  • Maintain and defend critical points of parity (Area B).
  • Correct, reduce, and eliminate disequities, or reveal equities that customers are unaware of (Areas E and D).
  • Potentially neutralize competitors’ differentiation (Area C).
  • Identify totally new value identified around customers’ unmet needs (Area G).

And importantly, these five categories of growth strategy can often be pursued in parallel, as a portfolio of strategies to accelerate growth by providing a big jump in customer value. We dig into these growth strategies in the next chapter.