You Need to Find Your Unique Selling Position (USP) in order to Reach Your Greatest Success. I'm sure you don't mean it, but you may be confusing customers with your advertising. Your customers have so many choices in almost every product classification. When they're shopping for a service or product its normal for them to have even thousands of alternatives.
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.
That's a good thing right? Sure . . . if you're the consumer. What about all of us marketing professionals who come to work everyday and try to find better ways of selling? How do we survive in such a world?
Your Advertising Needs to Set You Apart or You've Failed. The number one job of your advertising is to show your customer that you're NOT the same as everyone else. While working with a small business client the other day, we looked in the yellow pages for her business and saw an excellent example of how advertising should never be done.
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 was depressed over this, but I was energized! Why? This was a great opportunity for her to differentiate her business. Whoever differentiates wins the battle for business!
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?
Aren't your customers just the same? Yes. Obviously, you must be charging a reasonable price, but if you have established an important difference in your business, customers will pay extra to receive that benefit.
If you want more sales, better customers and higher profits, just find the important attribute which makes you different from you competitors. Then make certain you're telling your potential customers about it.
