Outsourcers increasingly need to deliver on outcome-based contracts. Provision of a service alone doesn’t necessarily cut the mustard. This means rethinking the service design and the engagement of audiences. Part of this is proposition development, says Peter Mills, strategic planning director at The Team.

Propositions are misunderstood. It’s marketing jargon gone crazy, of course. Some put this down to the whole offer, soup to nuts, everything we do. Others say it’s the pithy line that sums it all up: the strapline, the boilerplate, the slogan.

I think we should see proposition development in the round. We have an audience. They have a need, perhaps latent. How do we understand how they would respond to our offer and do the thing we want them to do? Do we have to change our offer to make it more engaging and effective?

What kind of thing are we talking about? It could be getting people to use less expensive, more effective channels, such as online services, over existing face-to-face services, or new employee appraisal systems, or registering for a service they don’t particularly want to use. It may be doing something they want to do, like reserve a book in a library, or something they don’t want to, like pay a fine.

We start at the beginning: the brief. Is the issue identified the right one? Are the audiences fully understood? Are existing messages what people really hear? How do we know that? Are these the most effective communication channels? How will we know we have been successful? Once these questions are answered, or at least explored, we need to agree an approach for coming up with the proposition.

Our preference is for a co-creation approach. It’s immediate history lies in online development. Although web technology was seen by many as a fantastic innovation, making money out it proved difficult to start with, partly because people just found the ‘experience’ just all too difficult. Co-creation, working with others to create something, is just so more effective than not working across both experts and users (who you should see as experts in their own right). It encourages improved buy-in and corporate memory. It is insight- and evidence-based. It exploits creative minds more fully, whoever they may be. It brings about advocacy and opens up networks.

This approach, therefore, needs open-mindedness, willingness to hear inconvenient truths and commitment to attention to detail. Committing to these things together helps better creative thinking.

Successful concepts come about because their creators understood their audience better than the audience themselves. How people frame their worlds and respond to norms is not necessarily conscious. Getting under people’s skin by reviewing existing research, carrying out fresh research where gaps are apparent, being imaginative in the design and execution of the research to truly understand motivations and willingness to change perceptions or behaviour, and checking channels and influencers provides a sound foundation for crisp proposition development and creative conceptualisation.

Wherever possible we develop pen portraits or personae against which we can continuously test our thinking. This means we have ‘the audience in the room’ and allows those not involved in the co-creation development directly to appreciate the thinking and rationale.

This is how we do it.

We understand the problem – for example, some people are not very good at doing something, but they need to. We get to appreciate why people are reluctant. Are people informed by myths and untruths? There may be a primary resistance, but this may be beyond our immediate influence, such as cost, or timings, or penalties, but there could be supplementary resistance or behaviours that we could influence, such as normative behaviours – I don’t do something because none of my friends do – or cultural framing. Propositions can be developed that recognise more latent ambitions and motivations and then tested using pen portraits and then in wider, more conventional environs, such as focus groups.

Propositions can be developed, and increasingly so, with a wide variety of invited expertise in the same room through facilitated workshops. These may already be within our own team, but also within the client’s team, although not necessarily in the direct client group, within customer groups and other ‘stakeholders’ – people with an interest in helping your target audience achieve your goals. The groups should be facilitated so that all ideas surfaced are captured, everyone gets to play a part and stimulus is loose enough to encourage development.

The ideal result of this activity is something you can prototype and test. It doesn’t have to be a full blown pilot, just something that is sufficiently realised that the process people need to go through are apparent and can be critiqued and improved.