How to Win with The 3Cs Model

Origin of the 3Cs model: Customers, Competitors and Corporation

The 3Cs model is a simple, foundational framework created by Kenichi Ohmae in the 1982 book, “The Mind of the Strategist: The Art of Japanese Business.” which has been widely used in Strategy and Marketing ever since.

The model or framework organises 3 factors required for an effective strategy. It was originally drawn as a triangle of three circles, but is now often represented as a Venn Diagram.  The circles represent Customers, Competitors, and Company (Corporation in Ohmae’s book). Each C is important, as they form the basis for three sets of Strategies, with customer strategies forming foundation for the other two.  Each C also impacts the others.  The 3Cs model is usually drawn as a Venn diagram with the intersections representing scenarios.  

A diagram of company competition Description automatically generated

Figure 1: 3Cs Model – Factors and Scenarios

I first saw the 3Cs model in action at a messaging workshop run by Corporate Visions to determine the messaging for the newly formed EMC Software in the early 2000s.  

Corporate Visions’ implementation is called the Value Wedge and it is described in Conversations that win the Complex sale (Petersen and Riesterer, 2011)  as a tool to help develop a point of view.  The Value Wedge renames two of the Cs: Customer to Prospect, Company to You and assigns attributes to each:

  • Important (to your prospect)
  • Unique (to you)
  • Defensible (versus the competition)

This is represented as a wedge shape with the attributes on each of sides.  When you can describe an element of your story that meets these criteria you have what Corporate Visions describes as a Power Position.

Adopting a Buyer’s Perspective

Whilst the 3Cs represents three players, we’ve found that by overlaying a buyer’s perspective on the 3Cs model we can use it to create a customer-centric approach in proposition development that is really powerful. Here are our three overlays:

  • Customer: Factors that contribute to a successful procurement (important)
  • Company: Proof points that the procurement will be successful (proven)
  • Competition: Evidence of why the final vendor was chosen over the competition (differentiated)

Embracing these points, we can draw the 3Cs as follows:

A diagram of a competitive advantage Description automatically generated

Figure 2: 3Cs – Factors with Attributes and an Additional Scenario

We’ve substituted Audience for Customer and assigned the scenario between You and Competition that is usually blank ‘out of scope’ to remind us to exclude whatever isn’t important to the audience.

Unpacking the Scenarios the 3Cs Model presents

There is rather more to these simple set of scenarios than meets the eye.

  • Your product does a lot more than the customer needs. Understanding what is important to the customer determines what to tell them about. Telling customers about elements of your product that do not relate to what is important to them at best weakens your story and at worst loses you the deal. The buyer will ask themselves ‘who understands our requirements best The vendor with the best understanding has a competitive advantage.
  • Your competitor’s product also does a lot more than the customer needs- Knowledge of a competitor is only useful when applied to knowledge of a customer.
  • Not every point you make has to be different to the competition, but you need to establish sufficient differentiation.
  • You know a great deal about your company but little of it is of interest to the customer. Also, What you can prove is always smaller than what you can assert, but much more powerful.
  • In the parity scenario the buyer has the advantage.  Procurement professionals love competitive parity as it hands them a strong negotiation hand and enables them to put pressure on pricing

The 3Cs Model In Action

In proposition development, the 3Cs is most useful in eliminating the extraneous and focusing on what really matters. For every point you want to make, test it with these three questions:

  • Does it really deliver value, and therefore matter to the customer?
  • Do we have sufficient proof points for it to be credible?
  • Is this different to what the prospect will have heard from the competition?

Once you have developed the points you want to make, these need to be crafted into a story which reflects your point of view. But that’s a story for another time…