The Rules of Growth
Michael Bayler
Strategist | Marketer | Author | Speaker | Delivering Breakthroughs to Value and Growth
Throughout 2025, I’ll be examining - with regular contributions from fellow travellers - the many and ever-changing facets of value in the 21st century. The work will be published here, and also made available as audio on the UNTHNKBL LIVE podcast.
The great marketing teacher and practitioner Tim Ambler, who passed in 2024, addressed, with his usual astringency, the eternal problem of defining the importance of brand and brand equity from two angles. Briefly over-simplified, brand is what people have in their heads about the business and its offerings, and brand equity is revenue waiting to be drawn down from the market in the future.
Behind these two insights lie two concepts of roughly equal concern to decision makers and innovators: value for customer and value for enterprise. When these very different commercial imperatives are in balance, we have our feet planted for growth, by which I mean not just respectable sales with decent margins, but a credible strategy and action plan that will deliver reputation, customer trust, loyalty and advocacy.
Also on offer, when we get this right, are clear and confident pipelines of profitable innovations - products and services that not only satisfy today’s and tomorrow’s customers, but are delivered by what we can call “just enough, just in time” business processes.
Thinking, working and investing in this way, we create growth for the business by consciously balancing both enterprise and customer value, and the effective with the efficient. Furthermore, as the chart above illustrates, we have a simple and accessible framework for the ongoing value- and growth-based evolution of the business, that removes the need for knee-jerk transformation projects.
For this first report from the frontline, let’s revisit an entirely crucial and often misunderstood tool for growth: the value proposition.
The Value Proposition Revisited
10 good reasons
When thought through and well articulated, the value proposition becomes a powerful lens, through which can be clarified and agreed:
So the value proposition has, or should have, enormous returns for a wide range of stakeholders and beneficiaries. It’s a low cost, high impact tool … a strategic gift that keeps on giving. And yet it’s remarkable how infrequently - and, even if it is done, how inadequately - a value proposition is properly bottomed out. Why is this?
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From invention to innovation ...
In my own experience of this type of work, often with new digital product and service development, the biggest blocks tend to be cultural. Engineers, for example, looking through profoundly different eyes to investors or marketers, tend to see an “invention” as the innovation itself. They also, it must be said, typically struggle to step through the looking glass to view their brainchild as a customer might see it.
There is still, after far too many decades, a stubborn antipathy in the engineering community to anything that looks like marketing or sales. I’ve also observed myself - and joked about it - that engineers remain “in love with the problem”, while everyone else wants to know about the solution.
But the value of the invention can’t be confused with the value of the innovation.
The former is typically based around an original solution to a functional problem. The latter, we could say, moves the invention forward, to become a marketable solution to a customer problem. The invention - in terms of value proposition development and all that follows - is important only insofar as it supports the anticipated delivery of product or service value to the customer. We could say that it’s the “how”, not the “why” or the “what”, the “where” or the “when”.
… and from innovation to exploitation
What we commonly refer to, under a blanket, catch-all term, as “innovation” in fact unpacks into several distinct and necessary phases. It may be useful to differentiate “Innovation as a process” (“Big I”) from innovation as one stage in this larger process (“little i”).
With this in mind, and having untangled “little i” innovation and invention, we can also add a third dynamic to the larger process of “Big I” Innovation. This is exploitation, used here in a non-pejorative commercial sense, as in combining impactful go to market and sustained realisation of commercial value.
All three of these dynamics - invention, innovation and exploitation - are required to be present, balanced and well-executed, in order for a programme of new product or service development to predictably deliver real returns to the firm.
“Little i” innovation, if we accept the approach, becomes the crucial bridge that links the functional solution of the invention to the marketing and income generation achieved in successful exploitation. And it’s precisely on this bridge - where a promising invention meets a potentially lucrative customer problem - that the majority of the value proposition work is focused.
We can see now why the deliberate and careful application of this work is crucial to the process of turning fresh invention into customer value, and customer value into profit for the firm. The model can also, by the way, be reversed. A market opportunity (exploitation) can be mapped back, via the innovation stage, to explore existing or potential inventions that could fit the bill.
While it may sound hubristic, it’s not ridiculous to suggest that the customer value proposition is, itself, the beating heart of successful commercial innovation.
Thanks as always for reading.
Great stuff.
Mike, I think there's a really important VP stage before entering your macro VP: that of being clear about the CEU (customer, end-users), the nature of their Problems (pains, gains, JTBD; then appropriate solutions to those problems, and then the optimal matches between problem(s) and solutions(s) for the CEUs. Finally there is the issue of the 4th box: Mobilisation and legality (do we have appropriate or potential BMs which are legal, that can realise the potential value(s). There is another issue about process innovation (where you can end up with fabulous processes - in terms of relative maturity that you should have outsourced because the products are in decline). Perhaps a better or alternative focus instead of process innovation could be BM innovation (which includes process?) ??