‘It's a great product’ won't sell anything：Learn to articulate real value 

This is an article for anyone involved in building products — whether you're a founder, product manager, marketer, or designer. If you've ever struggled to explain why your product is genuinely better than the others out there on the market, then this is for you. 

And we start with a film.

The Wolf of Wall Street

It was released in 2013, and in it, Leonardo DiCaprio plays Jordan Belfort, a real-life stockbroker who clawed his way to the top armed with bold ideas and a silver tongue. It's the story of a man who was as ambitious as he was self-destructive — eccentric, ruthless, and utterly compelling.

Fair warning here if you haven't seen it, because coming up are a couple of spoilers. They're worth it, though, because they contain two of the most revealing scenes ever put on screen about the nature of sales.

Sell me this pen

In the first, Belfort is trying to teach his recruits how to sell — using a pen as the example. One of his hires, Brad, a former marijuana dealer, doesn't describe the pen at all. Instead, he turns to Belfort and says: "Sign your name on that napkin." Belfort reaches for a pen — and realizes he doesn't have one. Need created. Sale made.

What Brad understands instinctively is the foundation of every strong selling point: before you talk about your product, you need to make the customer feel the problem that product’s designed to solve.

In the second, near the end of the story, Belfort hands a pen to someone in the audience at a speaking event and says, "Sell me this pen." The man, visibly flustered, replies: "This is a great pen. You can write down the important moments in your life." No need created. No sale made. So Belfort cuts him off and takes the pen back.

Painful as it to watch, buried inside that awkward exchange is something genuinely instructive — a glimpse into the heart of what we call the Value Proposition.

Improve the odds

Put simply, a Value Proposition answers one question: Why is our product or service better than all the others out there? I like to think of it as a recipe for a great meal And while I’m the first to admit that having a recipe doesn't guarantee a great meal… it definitely – dramatically – improves your odds.

That said, crafting a strong Value Proposition is anything but simple. So what I want to do in this article is explore the three essential building blocks of a compelling proposition. At the end, we'll come back to that pen, and show what a truly good answer might also have been.

Building Block #1 — What does the customer need?

You need to begin by understanding what the customer actually needs. And that’s not simple, because it’s not just one thing. It’s three. There are:

·                Needs the customer’s aware of, but that haven't been met

·                Needs that exist, but aren't being addressed in the right way

·                Needs the customer hasn't even consciously recognized yet.

In the case of the first, consider Dyson's famous tagline: The only vacuum that doesn't lose suction. The underlying customer frustration was real — nobody wanted to re-vacuum a room because the machine gave up halfway through and started leaving dust. Yet before Dyson made the problem explicit, most people had simply accepted that fading suction was just how vacuums worked. Dyson identified the problem, and in doing so, created the need. 

Henry Ford understood the second, and that he had to come up with something new, as this well-worn quote attributed to him shows: ‘If I had asked customers what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.’ He could see the need — to get from A to B more quickly — but he also realised that people were considering the wrong solution.

Finally, there’s the unconscious need, which Sony’s Walkman answered with spectacular success: the ability to enjoy music anywhere, anytime, without disturbing the people around you. It’s open to question whether consumers were aware of the need for portable music before the player existed. Personally, I lean toward thinking they were — the speed with which the Walkman did spread suggests it clicked with a need people very definitely felt. Whatever the answer, I find the Walkman a striking example of the meeting the third need.

Here’s the key point: understanding what ‘problem’ customers want solved isn't enough on its own. You also need to understand how they want it solved.

Getting it wrong

I once reviewed a Value Proposition for a toaster. It read: A toaster that makes delicious toast. It was ineffective. Why? Because ‘delicious’ is meaningless without context. What's wrong with the toast people are making now? Why isn’t that ‘delicious’? What are consumers frustrated by?

The answer might be that regular toasters evaporate all the moisture from the bread, making it taste dry and stale. If so, then what the customer needs is toast that's crispy on the outside and soft and chewy on the inside. Something that actually tastes freshly cooked. 

So saying a toaster makes ‘delicious’ toast is as useless – going back to The Wolf of Wall Street – as saying a pen is ‘great’, or that you can ‘write down the important moments in your life’ with it. They’re both propositions that tell us nothing about the problem the product can solve, or why it deserves be bought in the first place.

Building Block #2 — What’s the Discriminator?

This is the centrepiece of any Value Proposition: a short, punchy statement that captures the essence of the product. You can also think of it as the tagline. To succeed, it needs to weave together three things:

·                What the customer wants

·                How the product delivers it

·                Why the product is different from all other products.

By way of illustration, consider the contrast between two of the current biggest names in pop music: Beyoncé and Taylor Swift.

Two superstars

When I think of Beyoncé, I think of awe, of a force of nature, of a queen to be admired from afar. It’s a powerful brand, but also a distant one. Beyoncé is a superstar from another galaxy.

Taylor Swift, by contrast, has built her following on an entirely different promise: that she’s one of us. She’s the girl who writes songs about her own heartbreaks, who knows her fans by name, who even shows up to their weddings. Her brand could be summarized as ‘America's Best Friend’.

That summary – that ‘tagline’ if you will – is a near-perfect Discriminator. It captures a specific emotional desire (connection, not admiration), defines a clear point of difference (warmth and closeness versus glamour and distance), and does so in just three words.

Written out as a full Value Proposition, it might read: "Many artists inspire fans through talent and spectacle — but that very polish can feel out of reach. What a lot of fans truly want is someone who gets them, someone who feels like a friend rather than a phenomenon. Taylor Swift is that artist — the one who makes millions of people feel like she's singing just for them."

Be less busy

For another example from another, completely different world, consider Slack. This team communication service positioned itself against email. Although email isn't going away any time soon, frustration with it is most definitely real: slow threads, cluttered inboxes, messages lost in reply-all chains. 

Which is why Slack's early tagline, Be less busy, was so clever. Because it didn't describe a feature. It named a feeling. The Discriminator worked because it spoke directly to what people actually wanted: to feel less overwhelmed, not just use a different communication tool.

Toast

So if we go back to our toaster, we can now think of a more effective tagline than, ’A toaster that makes delicious toast’.  What about, ‘Crispy outside, chewy inside. The only toaster that offers the taste of freshly baked bread’? From the vague, we’ve gone to the precise. The words express both the customer's desire and what makes the product different to all the other toasters on the market. It’s all crystal clear.

Building Block #3 — Why should I believe you?

Finally, what marketers call the Reason to Believe — the evidence that backs up a tagline. And while it may seem like the least glamorous of the three, it is ultimately the most valuable.

Reasons

For Taylor Swift. The ‘best friend’ positioning isn't just a claim — it's been proven through consistent, repeated action: secret listening sessions hosted at her own home; personal notes she sends to fans; social media interactions that feel genuinely unscripted. The brand promise is made credible by behaviour that competitors simply cannot replicate overnight.

Physical products are different though. Their Reason to Believe is usually rooted in technology. Our toaster that claims to recreate the freshly baked experience could do so by any number of functions: steam, far-infrared heating, or a proprietary cooking method that preserves moisture.

Nor is it just technology. Other forms of proof can include expert endorsements; long-standing research; an in-house laboratory; or meaningful external partnerships. Something to set the product apart.

The proof is what wins

To understand why this matters so much, consider what happens over time in any successful market. When Dyson proved that bagless, constant-suction vacuums were what consumers actually wanted, all the major competitors took up the cry. Within a few years, the taglines started to converge — every vacuum cleaner manufacturer was promising powerful, consistent suction. The Discriminator, once unique, became run-of-the-mill

The same thing happened in team communication software. As soon as Slack demonstrated that users wanted something more human and real-time than email, a wave of competitors — Microsoft Teams, Google Chat, and others — arrived with nearly identical promises.

In both cases though, what ultimately separated the pioneers from the followers wasn't the tagline. It was the depth of proof behind it: the engineering investment, the years of iteration, the institutional knowledge that couldn't be copied from a marketing brief.

This is why the Reason to Believe deserves as much creative and strategic attention as the tagline. Because when the words all start to sound the same, the proof is what wins.

So what should he have said about the pen??

Remember: when Belfort handed the pen to that audience member and asked him to sell it, the man replied: "This is a great pen. You can write down the important moments in your life."

No customer need. No differentiation. No reason to believe.

But what if he had said this: "You're in back-to-back meetings all day, jotting down things you can't afford to forget — and nothing's worse than a pen that skips on the first stroke or bleeds through your notes. This one won't. It writes cleanly, first time, every time, and it's the only pen in this price range independently tested to last through 10,000 words without fading."

That's a powerful Value Proposition. It names a frustration, promises a specific solution, and gives you a reason to believe it's real. The same standard applies to any product.

Emotion, not intellect

Phrases such as ‘High quality’ and ‘Well-made’ won’t move move people — or organizations. They’re not enough. Everyone involved in building a new product needs to share a clear, deep understanding of its purpose and reason for being. Not just intellectually, but emotionally — a genuine gut-level conviction about why we are making this. 

That is where great product development truly begins.