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Documentation of the Value Cube framework

The Value Cube

The Value Cube is a visual and conceptual framework that helps ideate, analyse, and evaluate new and existing business models. It shows how complex business models are built from simple interacting components, and how to leverage them for successful strategies.

For every business, there are three ways to make more money: gain more customers, conclude more transactions per customer, and generate more revenue per transaction.

The overall volume of a business can therefore, in a simplified way, be expressed as “number of customers x number of transactions per customer x revenue per transaction”.

There are three universal strategies to maximise each of these figures: scale the business (to increase the number of customers), create customer loyalty (to increase the number of transactions per customer), and establish premium pricing (to increase the revenue per transaction).

These strategies can be combined, but only certain combinations make sense – keeping customers for longer (loyalty), for example, is perfectly compatible with gaining more customers (scale), but a high price (premium) will make it harder to reach more of them.

To make any of these strategies work, a business has to deliver value to its customers – they will only pay the business if the perceived value they receive (expressed in monetary terms) is greater than the price the business is charging. This value can take three specific forms, each of which is more closely related to some strategies than to others:

Core benefit (what customers can do with the product), which helps with scale and premium; network effects (how customers profit from other people using the product), which helps with scale and loyalty; and differentiation (what the product offers that competing products don’t), which helps with loyalty and premium.

Every business model is, explicitly or implicitly, an individual configuration of these components and their relationships. The Value Cube can help understand, shape, and leverage them.

Next Steps

• Read more about the Value Cube in our guide.
• Download the canvas to experiment with it.
• Visit the website to get in touch with the team.