Need a USP for your business – don’t bother!
When I first started in business I was told I had to separate myself from the competition by coming up with a unique selling proposition – a USP. The idea being that when a customer had a choice of companies from which to buy a certain product the USP would steer the customer towards me.
Typically a USP could be anything that makes me unique from my competition and in the past companies have used various USP’s in the hope of getting customers. USP’s such as:
- we are the cheapest
- our service is first class
- we provide a comprehensive solution
- we deliver 24 hours a day
- biggest product range
- money-back guarantee
- free gift with every purchase
- get a discount if you order today
and so on.
You may notice from these examples that far from being unique, they can also be easily copied by any business. Coming up with a genuinely unique selling proposition is near on impossible today, largely due to the internet.
With the internet being available to pretty much everyone at a price that is rapidly no longer becoming a barrier, coming up with a USP that really is unique is incredibly difficult. Partly because of the rapid increase in competing businesses, due to this low cost of entry, but also because consumers have greater access to information on every topic imaginable, 24 hours a day and can use this information to discredit your claims.
If you are struggling to differentiate your business and are thinking of trying to find another USP, don’t bother!
Yes that’s right, forget it.
You will waste hours and hours of your time trying to come up with an offering, a statement, an enhancement to your go-to-market model, that you believe differentiates you, only to find someone else is either already using the same USP or can easily copy it.
So if you are going to not bother developing a USP how can you differentiate yourself you might ask, because the requirement to be different from your competitors still stands?
The answer can be found in the behaviours of consumers, and I include businesses as consumers here, especially online. We have moved from being in an economy where companies push their marketing messages onto consumers who in turn react by buying products, to one of consumers requesting marketing messages that they want to hear, when they want to hear them.
I describe this phenomena as a relationship-based economy.
If you take a look at the success and rapid growth of many of the so-called social media sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and so on, these websites have attracted millions of participants because they have given people a place where they are in control of what they want to talk about, discuss, and review.
The phenomenon of the crowd describes like-minded groups of people getting together because they have a common interest. This is exactly what the social media sites have tapped into. This common interest also stretches to people recommending products and services to others, or offering their opinions on products and services they have bought or tried, to others who are considering buying them themselves.
No longer are the vendors of such items, ie. you or I, in control of the benefits and features that we want consumers to get excited about in order that they buy, or the timing of the marketing messages. Our consumers social media groupings, and the relationships they have access to online, determine what is good and bad about our product, not us. It is this behaviour that has broken down the effectiveness or even usefulness of a USP.
In order for you to attract customers for your offerings you must find ways of tapping into the crowds and building a relationship with them, and letting them experience what it is like to interact with you and your business before you even get to putting your product under their noses and getting them to buy.
When the consumer is ready to buy your product they will tell you but it will be based on what you have already done for them, or helped them with before then, and the relationship you have built with them. Think about this hard because if you get this right your business will flourish in this new economy, get it wrong and you will be out of business just as quickly.
So, don’t try and create a unique selling proposition, instead come up with a unique relationship building proposition and implement it before your competitors do.
