Article
Your Digital Product Needs a Value Proposition
January 5, 2026
What Is a Value Proposition?
Consumers and businesses make choices every day about which products and services to purchase. When a customer completes any type of purchase, it’s because the buyer believes that purchase provides a benefit (or value) at a fair price. A value proposition defines what benefit(s) a product or service provides to its target customers, conveys why they should choose to pay for it over alternatives, and summarizes it into a concise vision statement. A value proposition on its own does not constitute a comprehensive business strategy, but a business strategy without a value proposition is dead on arrival.
While value proposition formats can vary, they share commonalities, typically defining:
- What is your product/service?
- Who are the target customer(s) for the product/service?
- What are the target customers’ pain points and needs?
- What problems are customers trying to solve and what jobs are they trying to accomplish?
- How is your product/service uniquely positioned to help the customer?
- Why would customers choose to purchase your product/service over alternatives?
These key questions are relevant regardless of the product or service. Whether a consumer is selecting a hotel, plumber, or car insurance, or whether a business needs legal support, IT equipment, or a digital consultancy, the value proposition of the product or service is critical for the buyer making the purchasing decision.
One popular template for writing a value proposition consolidates these questions into a single statement:
Our [insert product/service] helps [insert customer segment(s)] who want to [insert jobs to be done] by [insert pain points and benefits product/service will address] unlike [insert competitor’s value proposition]. (Source: strategyzer.com)While this is just one of many possible formats, the exact template of the value proposition is less important than the investigative and analytical pre-work required to answer the foundational questions the value proposition should address. The statement itself may take minutes to write, but the inquiry required to make it true can take weeks or months — and that analytical rigor can be the difference between success and failure.
Value Propositions for Digital Products
A digital product is no different from any other product or service in needing a value proposition that defines how it will meet customers needs and help a business grow. Digital products can sometimes risk unnecessary features more than physical products, because they can be easier to change. There are no manufacturing plant lines to retool or raw material supply chain channels to reconfigure. The iterative nature of digital product development is a strength if discovery and user testing are part of the design and development cycle, but it can also be a liability when features are added without validating customer needs. A value proposition helps guard against a “feature factory” — when features are added because they can be built or seem interesting to someone who is not the end customer, but not necessarily because they should be built.
Why Value Propositions Matter in Digital Product Strategy
Creating a value proposition is a critical part of a digital product’s overall strategy. Putting in the effort upfront to align on a strong value proposition creates many downstream benefits, including:
- Gaining a deep understanding of customer needs and pain points
- Identifying customer and competitive knowledge gaps
- Understanding the competitive landscape and the value that customers’ alternatives provide
- Avoiding “shiny object syndrome” (SOS), and instead relying on data and insights over opinion in making product decisions
- Reducing the risk of investing time and money in a product that does not meet end customer needs or business goals
- Aligning the team, leadership, and resources around a shared understanding of customers value
- Providing a concise starting point for building a go to market strategy
While developing a value proposition seems obvious, some businesses short-change this step by relying heavily on assumptions that have not been tested or validated.
Creating a Lasting Value Proposition
Defining clear value propositions is not new to us at Livefront. We regularly guide clients through this process at the outset of building new digital products — often beginning with a version of the template above, and tailoring each value proposition to the specific goals and pain points of the product as we learn more during discovery. This investment has yielded countless insights over time and allowed us to refine the strategic vision for many successful digital products, including:
The Box Tops for Education App: Validating What Users Value
Having raised nearly $1 billion to date for schools and teachers, the Box Tops program historically relied on customers clipping physical box tops off of General Mills products and submitting them by mail to raise money. While the program had been highly successful, General Mills eventually needed a digital value proposition in order to meet changing customer needs and provide a more frictionless and sustainable mechanism for submitting box tops. Livefront worked with General Mills to create the Box Tops app , bringing the value proposition of the program to life in a digital experience for the first time — with digital receipt scanning, a dashboard to track progress and impact, and more. The app reimagined the entire Box Tops program customer journey, eliminating the pain points involved in mailing vouchers while giving customers greater visibility to the impact of their contributions. We have continued to rely on direct user feedback to test and validate new features and improvements over time — including Spanish language support, a retail partnership with Walmart, and seasonal sweepstakes and campaigns.
The Great Clips App: Meeting Customer Needs Via Mobile
When Great Clips first approached Livefront to accelerate its digital roadmap, the nation’s largest hair salon franchise already had a well-established value proposition of quick haircuts at an affordable price — with no advance scheduling needed. Livefront helped bring this same value proposition to mobile with the Great Clips app , giving customers transparency and control over the haircut experience from the convenience of their smartphone. The app allows customers to effortlessly search for salon locations, compare wait times, reserve a spot, view their place in line, and check in. As a result, the mobile app has become an integral part of Great Clips’ overall value proposition and is one of the brand’s differentiators as a product in national marketing campaigns.
The Life Time App: Driving Digital Differentiation
While a well-written value proposition requires a deep understanding of existing customers, equally important to the process is looking externally at the competition to understand how target customers elsewhere in the market are accomplishing their goals (or “jobs to be done”). This has been critical to our work with Life Time, whose mobile app competes in a digital health and wellness space that is crowded with digital experiences for workouts, mobility, nutrition, meditation, sleep, mental health, and more. With so many offerings available in Life Time’s category, we conducted extensive competitive research of other brands’ digital and in-person experiences to identify opportunities where Life Time could provide unique value. We analyzed points of parity, points of differentiation, and must-haves to meet table stakes expectations. As a result, Life Time has successfully differentiated its app experiences with industry-leading capabilities such as an all-new AI assistant, semantic search, hyper-personalized workouts, and more.
These are just three examples of many to demonstrate that when agency, product, and digital leadership teams are aligned and invested in crafting a compelling digital product value proposition, the experiences we ultimately create together are far more likely to meet customer and business goals.
Your Value Proposition Will Evolve
A value proposition is not stagnant. Just like the digital product itself, a value proposition should be tested and iterated as new information surfaces about customers and the market. Customer expectations change rapidly, especially with digital experiences. Sometimes a value proposition needs small modifications, and other times a holistic reimagining. A value proposition should be periodically revisited to reflect changes in customer needs, competitors, and market conditions. (For related reading on how we approach these types of inquiries with our clients and users, check out these Livefront articles on qualitative vs. quantitative research and moderated vs. unmoderated research .)
Our Value Proposition: Livefront Can Help
Not sure where to start defining the value proposition for your digital product? We can help, no matter what stage your organization is at in the journey. Whether you need a thought partner to help envision a bolder future for your product, or you already have a strong concept that needs testing and validation, we have expertise and practical know-how to help strengthen your value proposition. At Livefront, we run strategy workshops with our clients to help align on customer needs, the competitive landscape, and the unique value a digital experience can deliver before any investment is made in building a product. Livefront’s own value proposition is, “We help companies grow by creating digital products people love.” We’d love to help you do just that.
