What you can offer your customers that your competitors do not or cannot offer, is your unique selling proposition or unique selling point (USP). In a world of me-too products, you have to find a way to distinguish your product or service in the minds of your customers to be able to convince them to buy your stuff. That is the way to build your competitive advantage. But USPs are difficult to identify and even when you can do so, there is always the threat of your competition rushing to copy it and eroding your competitive advantage. So, one has to proceed carefully and cautiously in zeroing in on one’s USP.
When you think of USPs the common ones that come to mind are (1) Head & Shoulders: “You get rid of dandruff”; (2) Anacin: “Fast, fast, incredibly fast relief”; (3) FedEx: “When your package absolutely, positively has to get there overnight”; (4) M&M’s: “Melts in your mouth, not in your hand”; (5) Domino’s Pizza: “You get fresh, hot pizza delivered to your door in 30 minutes or less—or it’s free”.
The concept of USP was advanced in the early 1940s to explain a pattern found in successful advertising campaigns back then. Such campaigns made unique propositions to the customer that convinced them enough to switch brands. The term was developed by Rosser Reeves, a television advertising pioneer. Theodore Levitt, a professor at Harvard Business School, suggested something similar by saying that, “Differentiation is one of the most important strategic and tactical activities in which companies must constantly engage.” The question then is how does one identify and use a USP to one’s advantage. Here are some ground rules.
One way to find your USP is by studying other companies’ ads and marketing strategies. By analyzing what they say they sell, not merely their product or service characteristics, you get to know a great deal about how companies are trying to distinguish themselves from their competitors. This can give you clues to figuring out your own USP. For example, Revlon “sells hope, not makeup”. Some airlines sell on-time service, while others sell friendly service. Wal-Mart sells bargains, while Neiman Marcus sells luxury.
The other way to find your USP is to do a more systematic analysis and synthesis, as follows:
- Figure Out Your Target Audience: Before you do marketing, you need to know who to market your product or service to, that is, who your target audience is.
- Place Yourself in Your Customers’ Shoes: It is not enough if you are in love with your product. It is the customer who needs to fall in love with it, and to do so you must satisfy the customer’s needs. Figure out what your customers really want. For instance, visitors to your pizza place might be coming more for the quality, convenience, customer service, or cleanliness and not merely for the food. So, always ask yourself what is the need or challenge that your customer is facing which you can solve for him.
- List Out Your Distinctive Benefits: List around 3-5 of the distinctive benefits that a customer gets by choosing your product or service that they cannot get from your competitors.
- Define Your Promise: Choose one or two distinctive benefits and offer them to the customer as a pledge or promise. This can be either explicit or implicit, but write down what you are going to pledge.
- Refine and Rework: Once you have gone through the previous steps, write out a paragraph describing what you have uncovered and learned. This would involve quite a bit of refining and reworking because there are bound to be recurring ideas and thoughts, necessitating the merging of statements and rewriting.
- Pare it Down: Condense the above paragraph to one sentence or one phrase that captures the essence of that paragraph. That will be your simple and specific USP.
