Defining a global division's value proposition

Context

In freight forwarding, the lanes, carriers and rates look much alike from one forwarder to the next, and buyers tend to treat the service as a commodity. The division had chosen service quality as its answer, with the strategy team leading the effort alongside commercial and product leadership. The strategy team asked me to look at the service promise sales were using: a wheel of six headline claims, with dozens of overlapping claims behind them. It was hard for sales to pitch in one breath, and hard for operations to carry into their daily work.

Meanwhile, operations had made a commitment of their own. A new transport management system had taken much of the repetitive work off the air and ocean operators, and the product teams decided to put that time back into the customer: one operator owning each shipment, from booking to delivery. Two departments were working toward the same idea of quality, and there was no single story yet for customers and operators to share.

The objective

A value proposition anchored in quality that the company’s own people would hear in the same words as its customers. When the promise and the job description match line for line, every conversation, internal or external, tells the same story.

The insight

Owning a shipment means coordinating people the forwarder doesn’t employ: airlines and shipping lines, customs brokers, hauliers, warehouses. The operator rarely moves the cargo themselves. They make sure everyone who does plays their part on time, together, and they answer for the result. That is a conductor’s job. Casting the operator as one turned the ownership commitment into an image both audiences could hold. To a customer, it says someone answers for your shipment. To an operator, it describes the job they had just signed up for. And the distance between a concert hall and a container yard makes people smile.

What I did

The image came after the groundwork. The timing was serendipitous: I had just proposed a simpler service promise to the strategy team when the air and ocean product teams asked for help putting their ownership commitment into words. Two strong teams wanted the company working toward the same thing, and my role was to bring their asks together while the momentum was there. I ran the workshops with product and operations, kept what a customer could rely on, and wrote the manifesto for the new way of working. Product, Strategy and Marketing & Sales signed it off after two review rounds. The conductor was how I proposed to bring it to customers.

The value proposition became one promise: that customers could ship with confidence. Three pillars carry it: products, people and data. In other words, the network that moves the cargo, the people who run it, and the visibility that lets customers act on it. Together they describe what a customer would want from an ideal forwarder. Each pillar makes a claim and backs it with three proofs, a number people can remember. The pillars stay distinct but lean on one another. The data is read by an expert, the products are run by certified forwarders, and the people have time because of the technology.

Claims09

Each pillar also opens onto deeper material. Products leads to the full product portfolio, and data to the division’s existing digital tools. People leads to the manifesto, which gave the middle pillar a voice as strong as the other two.

The outcome

• 1promise, on three pillars
• 9proofs, from dozens of claims
• 3functions signing it off

The framework became the division’s value proposition. I presented it to the division’s entire senior leadership, at global, regional and country level, and it anchored the year-start activation and a leadership offsite. It has since outlasted a new chief executive and a changing team, and it remains the foundation the commercial team builds on, almost unchanged.

Skills and tools

Strategy

• Value proposition architecture
• Messaging framework

Facilitation

• Workshops with product and operations
• Stakeholder interviews
• Cross-functional sign-off

Content

• Manifesto writing
• Presentation design
• Internal activation