Buyer Utility Map

W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne of the international business school INSEAD developed this tool to help managers generate new business ideas.

The Buyer Utility Map is a tool that helps managers test whether their business or product/service offers a leap in value to buyers. It also helps managers test whether their business or product/service unwittingly blocks buyer utility across the totality of the buyer's experience. A buyers' experience can be broadly broken into a cycle of six stages: Purchase, Delivery, Use, Supplements, Maintenance, and Disposal. At each stage, a company can typically use six levers to unlock exceptional buyer utility: Customer Productivity, Simplicity, Convenience, Risk, Fun & Image, and Environmental Friendliness. The buyer utility map is a two-dimensional matrix that displays the six stages of the buyer experience cycle on one dimension, and the six utility levers on the other.

By applying the buyer utility map, managers:

1. gain initial insights into the unquestioned assumptions that their industry is based on that detract from value and can be reversed;
2. can test the exceptional utility of their offering by checking whether their business or product/service removes the biggest blocks to utility across the experience cycle;
3. can uncover what assumptions increase costs without significantly raising buyer utility.
   

By locating an innovation on one of the resulting 36 spaces of the map, you can see how the idea "creates a different utility proposition from existing products." The tool is intended to encourage you to come up with innovations that effectively "create new expectations for a familiar experience." To do this, you may use the dominant utility lever in a new stage of the buying experience, as Dell did in applying the productivity lever to the delivery experience, or using a new utility lever in a new stage, as Philips did in marketing its environmentally friendly fluorescent bulb, the Alto.

 

A customer’s experience can usually be broken down into a cycle of six distinct stages, running more or less sequentially from purchase to disposal. Each stage encompasses a wide variety of specific experiences. Purchasing, for example, includes the experience of browsing Amazon.com as well as the experience of pushing a shopping cart through Wal-Mart’s aisles.

• Purchase: the time it takes to find the product; the attractiveness and accessibility of the store; the level of security in making transactions; the speed with which purchases are made.
• Delivery: the speed and convenience of product delivery; the ease of unpacking and installing the product.
• Use: the degree to which the product requires training or expert assistance; ease of storing the product; the effectiveness of the product's features and functions.
• Supplements: whether other accessories are required to operate the product; the price of these accessories.
• Maintenance: ease of maintaining and upgrading the product; the degree to which maintaining the product requires expert assistance.
• Disposal: whether the product generates waste; the ease of disposing of this waste.

Buyer Experience Cycle / Buyer Utility Map and a German example, analysis of Innovation.

Every stage offers opportunities to enhance customer satisfaction by activating what Kim and Mauborgne call "levers of utility." There are six levers:

• Customer productivity. The innovation helps customers do things faster, better or in different ways.
• Simplicity. The innovation offers enhanced ease-of-use.
• Convenience. The innovation is easy to obtain or otherwise makes a desired activity easier to perform.
• Risk. The innovation minimizes customers' financial or physical risks.
• Fun and image. The innovation delights customers.
• Environmental friendliness. The innovation facilitates recycling and other environmentally sensitive practices.

A customer’s experience can usually be broken down into a cycle of six distinct stages, running more or less sequentially from purchase to disposal. Each stage encompasses a wide variety of specific experiences. Purchasing, for example, includes the experience of browsing Amazon.com as well as the experience of pushing a shopping cart through Wal-Mart’s aisles.

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