It is not a matter of if; it is a matter of when; your business model will be copied and replicated. What is hard to copy is your business strategy, unique selling proposition and competitive advantage. A Unique Selling Proposition is a statement that describes how your product, service or company is different from the competition. At the core of the Unique Selling Proposition is the question: What are the benefits that your business can offer that the competition is not offering?
A Unique Selling Proposition is a statement that describes how your product, service or company is different from the competition.
The term was popularized by American advertising executive Rosser Reeves of Ted Bates & Company. In his 1961 book, “Reality in Advertising” 1 Reeves defined the USP as a theory of the ideal selling concept. It is a condensation—a verbal shorthand if you will—of what makes a campaign work. He noted that the USP is divided into three parts:
- Each advertisement must make a proposition to the consumer. Not just words, not just product puffery, not just show-window advertising. Each advertisement must say to each reader: “Buy this product, and you will get this specific benefit.”
- The proposition must be one that the competition either cannot or does not, offer. It must be unique—either a uniqueness of the brand or a claim not otherwise made in that particular field of advertising.
- The proposition must be so strong that it can move the mass millions, i.e., pull over new customers to your product.
Many successful businesses use their USP as their company slogan. The tagline and slogan of some of the most successful companies in the world are inspirational, aspirational, catchy, and usually distill what the organization is aiming for and the benefit the consumer would derive from choosing them ahead of the competition.
Here are some examples of companies with USP in their slogan and tagline:
- Mastercard: “There are some things money can’t buy; for everything else, there’s Mastercard”
- BMW: “Ultimate Driving Machine“
- Apple: “Think Different”
- Domino Pizza: “You get fresh, hot pizza delivered to your door in 30 minutes or less or it’s free.”
- Uber: “Move the way you want.”
- Airbnb: “Belong Anywhere”
- Kentucky Fried Chicken: “finger lickin’ good”
- Avis Car Rental: “When you’re only No. 2, you try harder,”
- De Beers: “A Diamond is Forever”
- Nike: “Just Do It”
- FedEx: “When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight.”
Marketing is an uphill battle if you haven’t clearly clarified first in your mind why your business exists and why people should buy from you rather than your nearest competitor. You need to develop your unique selling proposition (USP). 2
The entire goal of your USP is to answer this question: Why should I buy from you rather than from your nearest competitor?
Another good test is this:
If I removed the company name and logo from your website, would people still know that it’s you or could it be any other company in your industry?
The common place people go wrong with developing their USP is they say “quality” or “great service” is their USP. There are two things wrong with that:
- Quality and great service are expectations, they are just part of good business practice—not something unique.
- People only find out about your quality and great service after they’ve bought. A good USP is designed to attract prospects before they’ve made a purchasing decision.
You know you’re marketing your business as a commodity when prospects start the conversation by asking you about price.
Positioning yourself as a commodity and hence being shopped on price alone is a terrible position for a small business owner to be in. It’s soul crushing and this race to the bottom is bound to end in tears.
The answer is to develop a unique selling proposition (USP). Something that positions you differently, so that prospects are forced to make an apples-to-oranges comparison when comparing you with your competitor. If they can do an apples-to-apples comparison of you and your competitors then it comes down to price and you’re toast. There’s always someone willing to sell cheaper than you.
In their book, Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant, 3 INSEAD professors W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne describe a four-action framework for differentiating a business in the marketplace. They write:
Blue ocean strategy challenges companies to break out of the red ocean of bloody competition by creating uncontested market space that makes the competition irrelevant. Instead of dividing up existing—and often shrinking—demand and benchmarking competitors, blue ocean strategy is about growing demand and breaking away from the competition.
The Four Actions Framework
To break the trade-off between differentiation and low cost and to create a new value curve, there are four key questions to challenge an industry’s strategic logic and business model:
Which of the factors that the industry takes for granted should be eliminated?
- The first question forces you to consider eliminating factors that companies in your industry have long competed on. Often those factors are taken for granted even though they no longer have value or may even detract from value.
Which factors should be reduced well below the industry’s standard?
- The second question forces you to determine whether products or services have been overdesigned in the race to match and beat the competition.
Which factors should be raised well above the industry’s standard?
- The third question pushes you to uncover and eliminate the compromises your industry forces customers to make.
Which factors should be created that the industry has never offered?
- The fourth question helps you to discover entirely new sources of value for buyers and to create new demand and shift the strategic pricing of the industry.
