What’s Your Unique Selling Proposition?

Happy New Year and welcome to our first issue of 2016! As I continue to cover what I consider to be the fundamental principles for those whose goal is to market their business/organization effectively, there’s very little that’s more critical than defining your company’s unique position in the marketplace and setting yourself apart from your competition with a Unique Selling Proposition.

Theodore Levitt, an esteemed professor at Harvard Business School, once posited that “Differentiation is one of the most important strategic and tactical activities in which companies must constantly engage.”

This holds true with the idea that in order to achieve top-of-mind recognition in a competitive, often saturated marketplace, it is essential that your business has at least one key attribute that is unique in a way that captivates your target audience and communicates value. (Note: It must be more than just your fantastic product(s) and outstanding customer service, although it could possibly be a distinctive characteristic related to either).

There are two related principles to commit to memory, with one somewhat evolving from the other: Unique Selling Proposition (USP) and Positioning Statement.

In Rosser Reeves’ book Reality in Advertising, he defines the Unique Selling Proposition in three parts:

1. Each advertisement must make a proposition to the consumer—not just words, product puffery, or show-window advertising. Each advertisement must say to each reader: “Buy this product, for this specific benefit.”

2. The proposition must be one the competition cannot or does not offer. It must be unique—either in the brand or in a claim the rest of that particular advertising area does not make.

3. The proposition must be strong enough to move the masses, i.e. attract new customers as well as potential customers.

When shifting to the concept of the positioning statement, essentially you are adding the piece where you determining what place your brand should occupy in the consumer’s mind compared to your competition. The model, presented by Al Ries and Jack Trout in their book Positioning: Battle For Your Mind, directs marketing professionals to determine the cognitive gap, locating “which functional benefit in a given category is most valued by consumers and least dominated by other brands.” Positioning is also commonly known as mindshare marketing; according to Douglas Holt and Douglas Cameron in Cultural Strategy: Using Innovative Ideologies to Build Breakthrough Brands, the aim is to stake a claim to the cognitive association in consumers’ minds, connecting the brand’s trademark with the benefit claim as “simply, consistently and frequently as possible.”

It’s easy to gravitate towards dazzling the masses by promoting all of the great things you have to offer, but by first stripping that down to your base identity, you’ll find that you have something that no one else has and you should be promoting and capitalizing on exactly that because it’s what makes you irreplaceable. Furthermore, when you first seek to do something better by doing it uniquely, it completely flips the focus from being about what others are doing (and competing on price) to what YOU are doing, which will also position you to be the expert.

To learn more about how Strictly Business can help you, contact me directly at (402) 466-3330 or visit www.strictly-business.com/connect.