Finding your USP
You can create your USP from something that you and your competition already share
What is it that’s different about you and your product or service? What’s your USP or Unique Selling Point? Having one makes you, your product or service easier to market.
The fact that we are all human beings and all that little bit different means we’ll always do things differently.
Pulling out ‘your’ USP can be difficult though. If you’re in a sector shared by lots of others, isolating that difference can take some work.
Sometimes it’s possible to create a USP by just presenting how you do things in a way that separates you from your competition. Big brands do this all the time. Here’s an example from my kitchen cupboard.
The simplest porridge
I sat at the kitchen table looking at three small boxes of porridge my wife found to be ‘out of date’ in the back of a kitchen cupboard.
The boxes held the promise that these porridge oats are somehow simpler to make than other porridge oats. And there lies the problem, that’s why they are out of date. I didn’t eat them because I didn’t buy them, the kids did.
I know how easy it is to make porridge, I have a big bag of jumbo oats in the cupboard that I eat most mornings. My kids, though, they saw the box of individual sachets and thought ‘that looks easy and convenient,’ so they bought them.
So there we have it. Two types of porridge, but one claims to have a unique selling point, an advantage over the other. The reality is that they are both easy and convenient.
Finding unique from something that isn’t unique
The clever marketing people at the big brand decided that this was a marketable feature. They pulled out a Unique Selling Point that wasn’t really unique at all. They put their porridge in handy sachets that didn’t need weighing or measuring out. And they added some flavouring. It worked, they have occupied space in my cupboard for months.
Ultimately, my kids didn’t make use of the 20-second advantage that a pre-packaged amount of porridge gave them. They still value that time as sleeping time, so they can fly out the door to college without eating breakfast.
Never mind, it has given me a handy example of how you can find a USP even if there isn’t really one to be had.
Find your USP
What do you do that is different from your competition? Or, more interestingly, what can you talk about in your business, maybe tweak a little that will give you some kind of distinction differentiating you from your competition? There will be something, you just have to be creative to find it.
