How propositions typically get built

There are several common patterns, and none of them start from market needs:

• Existing capabilities: ‘we can do this, so let us find customers for it.’ The proposition is defined by what the business already has, not by what the market is asking for.
• Newly acquired technology or a recent acquisition: a business acquires a tool or a capability and builds a market strategy around the asset rather than the need it might address. The commercial logic flows backwards from the investment, not forward from customer insight.
• What works in another market: the assumption that a proposition that has succeeded elsewhere will transfer directly, without accounting for differences in how buyers in this market purchase, what they value, and who the competition is.
• Requests from a small number of loud customers: a handful of vocal clients ask for something, and the business treats this as a market signal. It may be – or it may reflect the specific situation of those customers, with no broader demand behind it.
• Me-too-ing a competitor: entering on the market leader’s terms, offering a broadly similar proposition with modest differentiation. This approach competes directly on the incumbent’s strengths rather than finding the white space they have left open.

None of these are starting from a clear picture of what the market actually needs. The result is a proposition that may be technically sound and commercially coherent but fails to land – because it was designed around internal logic rather than external demand.

What a needs-first approach looks like

Building from market needs requires deliberate investment in understanding the customer before committing to the proposition. There are four things this involves in practice.

First, proprietary insight from depth interviews – with prospective customers, with people who have bought from competitors, and with market experts who understand where the sector is heading. The goal is to go beyond what buyers say they want (their stated needs) to understand the problems they are trying to solve, the constraints they are working within, and where they expect their priorities to shift over the next few years. This kind of insight is not available in market reports or secondary data. It requires direct conversation.

Second, identifying pain points that have been normalised by habit. Some of the most valuable opportunities in any market are the problems that buyers have learned to live with – frustrations that are significant enough to create switching behaviour if a better solution appears, but that rarely come up unprompted in a customer conversation because buyers have stopped expecting them to be resolved. Surfacing these requires a specific kind of research: probing for workarounds, inefficiencies that are tolerated, and things that are done manually because no-one has built the right tool.

Third, pressure-testing the proposition against regulatory and market changes before investment decisions are made. The needs that matter are not just today’s needs. A proposition built around the current state of a market may be well-timed or poorly timed depending on what regulatory, competitive or structural changes are coming. This requires both market knowledge and a willingness to stress-test the commercial case against scenarios that are uncomfortable.

Fourth, translating insight into specific product or service decisions rather than general direction. The most common failure mode at this stage is a research process that produces rich insight but a vague commercial output: ‘customers want better service’ or ‘there is demand for more flexibility.’ These observations need to be converted into specific decisions about what the proposition includes, what it excludes, how it is priced, and what the go-to-market looks like.

The result