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If You Can't Communicate Your Difference, You'll Die!
Finding Your Unique Selling Position (USP) May be The Most Critical Activity for Your Success. Your advertising lives in a world of complexity and confusion. Consumers have so many choices in almost every product classification. When you're shopping for a service or product it's common to have even thousands of choices..
Finding Your Unique Selling Position (USP) May be The Most Critical Activity for Your Success. Your advertising lives in a world of complexity and confusion. Consumers have so many choices in almost every product classification. When you’re shopping for a service or product it’s common to have even thousands of choices..
If you don’t believe me just search the Internet for common products to buy and look at the search results. You could be faced with alternatives in the millions.
So that’s good right? You’re sure to like it if you’re the buyer. But us markteters will find it a challenge? What are we to do in order for our companies to survive?
Your Advertising Must Set You Apart from Your Competitors. Your advertising must tell your prospect that you’re different from the competition. In a meeting with a client the other day, we turned to the yellow pages for their product category and there was a vivid example of how NOT to do advertising.
We found pages and pages of ads—all so much the same that you could literally substitute one company name for another and not have to change the ads at all!
My client found this depressing, but I was thrilled! Why? She had a great opportunity to differentiate her business. Whoever differentiates will win the business battle!
When there are no apparent differences customers will decide based on price. So what happens when customers are faced with hundreds of choices and dont see any difference between one business and another? The only thing left to compare is price, so that’s how they make their choice. If you haven’t shown that you’re different, price will be the deciding factor for your customers too. That’s not the best thing for you and your business, and this might surprise you, but it’s not good for your customer either—especially if your value is best recognized by establishing a long-term relationship with the customer. Business you get because you have the best price will go somewhere else as soon as they find a lower price. You may be the fastest gun in the West. But no matter how fast you are, there’s always someone faster. That’s a dangerous game. It’s much safer to differentiate.
You can command higher prices through differentiation. Companies who effectively differentiate themselves from their competitors can demand higher prices for their products or services. The lowest price is not always the winner. Think about this for a minute. You don’t always buy the lowest price. Even if you’re the world’s biggest cheapskate you can differentiate between bruised and fresh vegetables and you’ll pay the higher price for the fresh produce. Right?
Are your customers any different? No. Certainly, you must have a reasonable price, but if you have highlighted an important difference in your product or service, customers will pay extra to have that benefit.
One of the most important paths to increased sales, more satisfied customers and better profits is to find the important point which makes your business different from your competitors. Then be sure to make that obvious in your advertising.