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In this lesson, I'm going to show you exactly how I go about creating

products that are different and better than others on the market by

focusing on developing our products.

Unique Value Proposition or U V P.

It's your U V P that sets you apart from other products in the market.

It's the what's in it for me in your product.

A U V P is the promise that you make to your customers to deliver

a unique and valuable experience.

It's a clear, compelling message that states why you're

different and worth buying.

So it's important to have a U V P because it's what differentiates you from your

market, and it's ultimately what will add more value to your customers lives.

It's what makes your product attractive to customers.

And you can see that if you don't develop a U V P, then there's

nothing to differentiate you from your target market or show how your

product will ultimately add value to your customer after they purchase.

You'll look exactly the same as other products, and you won't stand out amongst

the sea of other options on the market.

You're just gonna be competing with players who already probably

have more capital, more customers, and better exposure than you.

So it's your U V P that sets you apart from your competition.

And I'm highly confident that the main reason that the fifth

achieved the success that it did was because of our point of difference.

At the fifth, we took an extremely saturated market, which is the watch

market that had a lot of startups and heritage brand key players, and

adopted a UVP that set us apart from all of the existing competition.

Our UVP was that we'd only sell our watches on the fifth day

of each month for five days.

In this way, we're able to be unique based on time rather than price.

Whereas a lot of other fashion and accessory companies gain their

exclusivity from having a high price tag.

So you can see this was one thing where we're able to instantly separate

ourselves from our competition.

So before we get started on how we come up with our U V P, I wanna

make something very clear to you.

There's a misconception in e-commerce that you need a crazy new product idea

to be successful, something so out of the box that it needs to be patented.

It's a top secret that nobody can possibly know about until you

launch and bang instant success.

This is not true at all, and actually a lot of the most successful

e-commerce brands are the ones that have taken existing problems and

solved them in a different way.

It's as simple as that.

So what's important to note here is that you don't need to reinvent the wheel.

So now that we've scrapped that misconception from our minds,

I can tell you exactly how I go about creating products that are

different and better than others on the market by finding our products.

U V P.

This is what I refer to as my product innovation framework and the underlying

thesis of my product innovation framework is that by simply changing

a single dimension or one part of a product, you can find your U V P.

Let me break this down for you.

So there are four main dimensions that I look at changing and playing with

in my product innovation framework.

And these are my products, design, function, price, and time.

Now let's go into some more examples and detail on each dimension.

I'm going to use three very different examples to highlight how my product

innovation framework can be used to make any product different and better.

So let's take our mobile phone case, for example, and look at how you

can make it different and better by changing the products design.

Two big trends in design that aren't going anywhere anytime soon are

customization and personalization.

While there's a difference between the two, they pretty much seek to achieve the

same goal, a product experience that's tailored to your customer's interests.

The difference between the two is that customization is based on a

specific customer, and personalization is dependent on a customer group.

An example of customization would be monogramming or engraving a

customer's initials onto your product.

For example, in the case of the daily edited in Australia

or away luggage in the us.

Whereas a great example of personalization would be the Share a Coke with Coca-Cola

campaign, whereby they use common names like Lauren, Dean, Sophie, or

Mark, and generic nouns like Mum, dad, nan, or even champ or mate.

Another example from a startup brand is the luxury drink bottle brand.

In Australia, I am swe who have different bottles personalized with

four different word options on their bottles for customers to choose from,

so their chic, zen fierce, or focus.

This helps your target customer profile themselves and represent their unique

personality through your product.

Next lesson, I'm gonna show you how to find your target

audience using customer personas.

So keep in mind how you could personalize your product for your personas, but

I'll remind you of that at the time.

So if we think of our mobile phone case or reusable straw concept, both

of these products lend themselves to personalization and customization.

For example, each straw could be engraved with your customer's initials, and that

would be an example of customization.

This would make the product feel more like their own and could also

be a great way not to get your straws mixed up with others around

the house or office, for example.

And the daily edited has some great examples when it comes to

customization of mobile phone cases.

A word of warning on customization, though I'm sure that you can imagine

that customization is a lot harder to achieve than personalization as it's

on a customer by customer basis and requires additional tech for both your

website and manufacturing processes.

Australian brand Shoes of prey was centered around mass customization in the

shoe space, and it actually went outta business recently, even after raising 30

million US dollars in investor funding.

So personalization will likely be easier to go with to begin with, and

unless your entire brand is going to be centered around it, customization

might be an idea to put to the side.

For now, we could use the I AM SWE personalization example with our mobile

phone case or reusable straw, for example, based off your audience's interests.

So now we wanna consider how we can add value and create a point of difference

in our product through the materials that we choose to make our product from.

Of course we wanna use high quality, durable materials in creating our product.

But something else that you might wanna consider here is sustainability.

Sustainability or eco-friendly design can create an entire U

V P in itself for your brand.

Let's take our mobile phone case, for example, here you might wanna create a

mobile phone case that's made of upcycled ocean plastic, or from compostable or

biodegradable materials like Pelle case.

If you're looking into ocean plastic, I'd check out the brand

Parley and some of their amazing partnerships with brands like Adidas.

Our metal straw already meets the sustainability criteria being made

outta metal as opposed to plastic.

So you can just focus in on some different colorways, especially trending ones

like Rose Gold, matte Black or chrome.

So you can see that just by changing that single dimension of your product,

its design, how we're able to start creating something different to and

better than other products on the market.

So now let's move into arguably the most powerful dimension of your product that

you have to play with, the function of your product or how your product works.

Changing, adding, or even subtracting functionality from a

product should always add value.

And to do this, The best way is by solving an existing customer

pain point with your product.

A product pain point is a specific problem your prospective customers

are experiencing with a product that's their existing product solution.

So what you wanna do here is look at your product and identify some of the existing

pain points with the product as it is now.

Think about what your product's currently used for the problems of this

and how they could be improved upon.

A really good way to do some research around this is to read the negative

reviews of similar products on Amazon, or review websites like Trustpilot.

Ignore the one star reviews as they'll just be people who have

had an unusually bad experience.

Instead, look at the two and three star ratings in particular.

I did an Instagram post that resonated really well with my audience,

and I said, want to know how to come up with a new product idea?

Read the negative reviews of a popular product, find the

most common and fix them.

That's some food for thought, and it's another approach that

you can take when thinking about how to add value to your product.

So now let's get back to changing the functionality of our reusable straw

to solve an existing pain point.

So the first couple of things that come to mind as pain points with

reusable straws are cleanliness.

You don't want a straw just floating around in your bag all day and the awkward

shape of a straw to carry around with you.

So a functional solution to these pain points could be designing a straw

that's retractable and able to be folded down and fit in a small case,

maybe the size of a matchbox or so.

And in turn, this case had helped protect your straw from dirt.

So maybe even making the case from something antibacterial like copper.

So let's use our mobile phone case, for example, here I've found three different

product pain points with mobile phone cases and three different brands that

are solving these in a unique way.

And all of these relate to selfies in one way or another, which is only

one potential use of a mobile phone.

So the first pain point is dropping your phone while taking a selfie, for

example, and a brand that's solving this is called Love Handle that sells

attachable handles to stick onto the back of your mobile phone, which you can slip

two fingers through for extra support.

Another pain point could be bad lighting for your selfies.

Lumi has solved this pain point by creating a mobile phone case

that has an inbuilt selfie light.

And our final selfie pain point is needing one or both your hands to take a selfie.

Goat case has solved this by creating a mobile phone case that

can stick to almost any surface.

So you can see that simply by looking at one use of your product, you can change

the functionality in multiple ways.

We can also think about how you might combine the functionality of

your product with the functionality of another product entirely, and

I call this product hybridization.

For example, the Looming case, which is a selfie light crossed

with the mobile phone case or your mobile phone case, could contain a

mirror or a quick fix makeup kit.

Or it could even connect via an app on your phone that lights up when you

need to return a call, for example.

That one would be a little more complicated, but you get the idea.

So think about some ways that you could change the functionality of your product

by combining it with another product.

I know this is fun.

Just don't go too crazy.

Keep it relevant.

Nobody wants a lawnmower that doubles as the baby prime, for example.

So now you can begin to understand the huge number of ways that you can

change your product's functionality to add value and differentiate yourself.