A company’s value proposition summarizes why consumers should buy a product or service from the company. But In order for a company to overcome the noisy competitive world market, one must  have a unique feature that differentiates it form other competitors. A unique value proposition communicates to customers the special contribution that is not featured by other company.

Unique value propositions, varies from one company to others, it mainly depends on what kind of business the company is selling. Product based companies, would look for high perceived values such as beautiful design, sophisticated technology, ease of use, and the ability to fill a need better that other competitors. Such examples can be seen with TD Bank’s coin counting feature, Jansport’s backpack lifetime warranty, BestBuy’s price match guarantee, etc. Service provider companies does it in a different way, through faster response time, higher level of expertise, and the ability to time the service offering that you have with a particular need. However, a value proposition can also be intangible. The Body Shop is one case, it gained a rapid growth from its  ethical approach, which was to distinguish themselves from other beauty products that mostly ignore ethical values.

Sources:

http://lbpost.com/business/small-business/2000002892-whip-your-business-into-shape-determine-your-unique-value-proposition-in-8-simple-questions#.UlLueGTwKYk

http://www.widerfunnel.com/value-proposition/how-to-create-an-awesome-value-proposition

Revenue streams, refers to different method a company can use to get their incomes. According to these articles, the second most used social media company, Twitter, is lacking its variant of revenue streams. Event hough Twitter’s revenue keeps going up, almost 90% of it has come from advertising. Promoted tweets, trends, and accounts has been the only way twitter is making money, which according to these articles, is a major future threat because the loss of advertising could harm the company’s business and as a whole.

Analysts think that  Twitter needs to find new streams of income, maybe through the charging of users to access the site, or maybe to look up to other company such as LinkedIn, where it generates its revenue from three streams; advertising, subscription, and recruiting tools, and Facebook, through its advertising and gaming. Twitter’s only reliability to its tweeting feature, is endangering the company itself as it relies the whole business to the content quality of its users. Diversifying revenue stream is very important for a company, because if one channel stops working, some sort of balance in where the income is coming from,  can be generated by other channels.

Sources: http://www.buzzfeed.com/peterlauria/how-twitters-business-model-is-just-like-broadcast-tv-only-w

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathansalembaskin/2013/10/04/twitter-ipo-proves-the-social-media-business-model/

It’s interesting these days that company’s ethical values has been considered one of the most important aspect of a company. Ethical behavior and corporate responsibility, doesn’t only bring up the company’s social reputation, it also gives significant financial benefits such as attracting more consumers, boosting labor satisfaction and productivity, as well as attracting more investors, keeping its share price high.

Clothing companies such as H&M, Marks & Spencer, Zara, and Topshop, have all been linked to numerous death cases due to poor working condition in their factories, by their safety and unfair wages.

Recently, a survey conducted by YouGov shows that most fashion consumers would pay more for ethical clothing production. Theoretically, companies that can emerge and brings up a sustainable and ethical concept of their production, will gain more benefit and profit as they will attract more of these ‘poverty and working conditions’ aware customers. It might be hard for clothing companies to satisfy the world fashion market that demands large volumes of quality clothing, however, human rights should never be violated no matter what the situations are.

Sources: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/oct/06/ethical-high-street-clothes-supply-chain-bangladesh

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/09/12/london-fashion-week-ethic_n_3914479.html?utm_hp_ref=uk