Gain Creators describe how your products and services create customer gains. They explicitly outline how you intend to create benefits that your customer expects, desires or would be surprised by, including functional utility, social gains, positive emotions, and cost savings.

The following list of trigger questions can help you think of different ways your products and services may help your customers obtain required, expected, desired, or unexpected outcomes and benefits. Ask yourself if they:

• Create savings that make your customers happy? E.g. in terms of time, money and effort, ...)
• Produce outcomes your customers expect or that go beyond their expectations? E.g. better quality levels, more of something, or less of something.
• Outperform current solutions and delight your customers? E.g. regarding specific features, performance, or quality.
• Make your customers’ work or life easier? E.g. via better usability, accessibility, more services, or lower cost of ownership.
• Create positive social consequences? E.g. makes them look good, or produces an increase in power, status.
• Do something specific that customers are looking for? E.g. good design, guarantees, specific or more features.
• Fulfill something customers are dreaming about? E.g. by helping them achieve their aspirations or getting a relief from a big issue?
• Produce positive outcomes matching your customers’ success and failure criteria? E.g. better performance, or lower cost)
• Help make adoption easier? E.g. lower cost, fewer investments, lower risk, better quality, performance, or design.

A gain creator can produce more or less relevant outcomes and benefits for the customer just like we have seen for pain relievers. Make sure you differentiate between substantial gains and nice-to-haves.