Today I am going to respectfully take on one of the sacred cows of marketing...the Unique Selling Proposition.
“You must have a USP!” has become a universal chant of marketing consultants the world over, and though their intentions are good, I think that we need to stop and really think about the concept and how it relates to business in a practical way.
As a way of standing out from the competition, the unique selling proposition is a useful concept. Any way you can differentiate your product or service in the buyer’s mind is good. To come up with a USP, you have to stop and think about what you are offering, why customers would buy from you instead of someone else, and how you can best convey those reasons to your market. That kind of strategic thinking is always useful because it is not something we often make time for. So pondering a USP as an exercise to hone our marketing messages is a good thing.
The place where I think many companies get hung up is on the word “unique.” If you believe that you must always have a USP, you are going to have to revise it frequently.
Why?
Because no matter how unique your selling proposition is, if it works, it won’t be unique for long.
Here are some examples of what I’m talking about: Many years ago, a man named Montgomery Ward came up with something completely new--offering an unconditional money back guarantee. More recently, a gentleman by the name of Joe Sugarman—who, by the way will be my guest here in a few weeks—also came up with something completely new—the idea of offering a toll free phone number to order products from his catalogs or infomercials. And a guy by the name of Joe Karbo was the very first person to write a “how to get rich” book based on his own personal experiences, and from his own viewpoint.
All three of those examples were unique—in fact, they all caused quite a stir in their respective markets when they were introduced. And they all worked brilliantly to capture sales. As a result, instead of being unique today, all three of those USPs have become common practice.
While that’s not surprising, it does point out that any USP is going to have a finite shelf life. Still, a USP does have a place in the product development process. And for either products or services it can work really well to gain a temporary market lead—until your competition catches up. But creating a USP simply because that’s how it’s done—as many marketers and business owners do—can waste time and resources.
A USP is a revenue-generating tool among many other revenue-generating tools. Use it for a specific product or marketing campaign when you are confident that having one is really going to pay off. Otherwise, invest your resources on other tactics.
Having said all that, I assert that there is one feature that remains unique no matter what—your personality, or, if you want to say it fancy, your company’s culture. The customer’s experience of working with your company will always be different from their experience of working with someone else. There’s no way to replicate that part of the purchase process.
So, though you will gain by applying the USP as a tool for specific marketing campaigns, in the long run your ability to get and keep more customers resides in how you interact with them day after day, month after month, and year after year. Investing time and resources in understanding your personality as a business, aligning it with your market, and expressing it in all your interactions is what will give you the best return in the long run.
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