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Unique Selling Proposition

What Is a USP and Why Is It Important.

A core piece of your marketing message is your Unique Selling Proposition, or USP. Spending time developing your USP, and continually refining it is an essential process that effects everything else in marketing that you do.

So, What is a USP and why is it so important? Read on and find out.

The key to a USP is the U. What is it that makes you Unique? The P, your Proposition, needs to contain something very appealing to your targeted market. (You do have a well defined targeted market, don’t you?) Your proposition tells your prospective buyer what it is that you have that they want, and why they want it. Then the Unique part tells your buyer why you are the only place they can get exactly what you’re offering. In other words, why you have no competition.

Sound difficult? It doesn’t have to be. It just takes some creative but structured thinking.

Two well known (but perhaps not well understood) USPs are Dominos Pizza and Federal Express. I bet you can state their slogans right away. What most people don’t understand is that the slogans are not the USP. The slogan communicates the USP (or part of the USP) in a short, memorable way. A USP is many times communicated using a paragraph or even a couple of paragraphs.

Dominos Pizza’s slogan is something like “Fresh, hot pizza delivered in 30 minutes or less, guaranteed!” Their USP would be more along the lines of:

For hungry people who eat pizza, want to eat where they are and don’t have much time, we will deliver the pizza of their choice, made fresh and kept hot to their door in 30 minutes or less.

An important thing to notice is that nothing is said about the taste of the pizza (such as “the best pizza in town”) or the cost (“cheapest pizza” or “best value”) or any other criteria people would select pizza. Dominos decided to mainly focus on speed of delivery plus that it was made fresh and still hot. The targeted market? Hungry people for whom pizza is an option, who cannot or don’t want to go out to get it. That’s the proposition.

What’s the unique part? That it would be delivered in 30 minutes or less, guaranteed. Other pizza places has fresh, hot pizza. Other pizza places delivered. But Dominos differentiated themselves from all the competition by stating that they were the only option when you needed pizza delivered in 30 minutes or less. Together, these all made the USP.

How about Federal Express? Their slogan is something like “When it absolutely, positively, has to be there overnight, it’s Federal Express” And what’s would their USP be? Something like:

When people have a letter or package that has to arrive at it’s destination the next day, we will do whatever it takes to get it there, and verify it’s arrival.

Federal Express clearly identified their target, did not get sidetracked by “lowest cost” or “safe handling” and built their USP all around what was important for their prospective buyer. And, they were the first to guarantee overnight deliver which made them unique.

The USP has to be used repetitively in your marketing literature to build the customer's or client's identification of your company with your product or service.

There are two major benefits in developing a clear, compelling USP. First, it clearly differentiates your business in the eyes of your current and potential customers or clients. Second, it focuses your team on delivering the promise of the USP, helping to improve your internal performance.

How do you think a Dominos delivery person would behave compared to a delivery person who works for a competitor without this USP? Do you think the team at Dominos made a considerable effort to develop systems to assure the USP was met?

Same with Federal Express. Stories are well known (probably spread by the company) about Federal Express employees going above and beyond to make sure packages were picked up and delivered overnight. All because the entire company has been built around the USP and everyone who works there becomes responsible to make sure the USP is accomplished.