Jamie Chatzopoulos, Marketing, Impact Hub, Amsterdam, NL
I’ve been thinking about value proposition a lot lately. It’s popped up in conversations with coworkers, and with a discussion with my parents when they came to visit. More on my parents visit later, but first, value proposition.
“Value Proposition”, if you’ve ever worked with any marketer before, you’ve heard that phrase before. Good ole Wikipedia defines it as “a promise of value to be delivered and acknowledged and a belief from the customer that value will be appealed and experienced. A value proposition can apply to an entire organization, or parts thereof, or customer accounts or products or services”. So, essentially, how much value a customer associates with your product or brand can be correlated with how much they are willing to pay for the product or experience.
Working with Impact Hub, I’ve realized that they are not clearly identifying their value proposition. They are an amazing organization that offers workbenches (specific classes on topics entrepreneurs request), Investment Ready workshops, and various programs helping entrepreneurs take their ideas into full business mode. One of their biggest assets is their community, both in office and via their brand of Impact Hubs globally and online. With all of these wonderful offerings, they are not clearly stating their value to their customers. Since spending time within the Hub, I’ve realized that customers take for granted the value of the office and expect certain luxurious now. In developing my marketing strategy, I’m hoping to dust off Impact Hub’s value proposition and shine some light on it. Hopefully by addressing their value proposition, it’ll be easy to target customers and have a high conversion rate of new customer sign ups. I hope that we will also be able to guide customers to appreciate/realize the value of Impact Hub and keep their membership, or refer it to friends. We will still need to figure out how to measure value, but that’s an issue for a later date.
I was fortunate to have my parents come visit me last weekend. I’ve been sharing with them my stories and how wonderful it’s been here in Amsterdam. I wanted to take the weekend to show them how wonderful the city is and I tried to convince them that Amsterdam was the best city in Europe. Unfortunately I was not successful in convincing them of Amsterdam’s value proposition, but I’m still completely in love with the city. While my parents were here we took a short train ride out to a town called Zaanse Schans to see some traditional windmills, we are in Holland after all!
The windmills were amazing to see. They are completely made out of wood and are still working as dye mills. It was a wonderful experience to see how things were from the 18th and 19th century Holland. I would recommend this short excursion to anyone who wants to get out of the city for a few hours. Check out the pictures below! – Jamie 
Suffolk Graduate Travel Seminar 