The USP as a Method of Positioning Your Product in the Marketplace

By Michael Masterson

Coming up with the right USP (unique selling proposition) can make the difference between a mediocre product launch (which could mean a complete failure for a start-up company) and a big success.

In their classic marketing book Positioning, Al Ries and Jack Trout explain why a strong USP is so essential:

To succeed in our overcommunicated society, a company must create a position in the prospect’s mind, a position that takes into account not only a company’s own strengths and weaknesses, but those of its competitors as well. Advertising is entering an era where strategy is king. In the positioning era, it’s not enough to invent or discover something. It may not even be necessary. You must, however, be first to get in the prospect’s mind.

Ries and Trout point out that people spend very little time considering new information – usually just a second or two to figure out how to classify it. So you not only have to come up with a unique way to position your product in the marketplace, you have to find a way to communicate that position clearly and concisely with your advertising so it will be understood in the few moments of attention you are likely to get for it. That’s the purpose of the USP.

“If you provide a product or service that is just like an existing product or service, you will probably not succeed,” says Seth Godin in If You’re Clueless About Starting Your Own Business. “You need to be faster, more varied, slower, cheaper, easier to work with, prettier, more highly recommended – something to distinguish it.” And how do you communicate that distinction to your potential customers? With your USP.

Not sure how to distinguish your product? Godin recommends looking for a niche – some segment of the general market that is narrow enough for your product to dominate it.

“We paint houses,” is not a niche, Godin says. “We paint Victorian houses is.”

But is having a narrowly defined specialty enough? Not according to Jay Abraham, author of Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got. “Being unique is interesting,” Jay told me 20 years ago when we first discussed this concept, “but the USP has to have something to do with the customer. If it doesn’t sell, it doesn’t do you any good.”

What Jay meant was that the USP not only has to position your product or service in a unique place in the market, it also has to convey a specific benefit to the buyer. The fact that you paint only Victorian houses may be interesting to people who own Victorian houses, but unless you can explain why your specialization benefits them, they won’t be motivated to hire you.

How do you come up with a good benefit to emphasize in your USP?  Jay recommends taking a good look at products in the market that are similar to yours and trying to identify “unfilled customer needs” that you can satisfy with such things as:

• Faster service
• Better prices
• Superior quality
• Convenience
• Personal service
• A better guarantee

A USP that combines a narrowly defined specialty with a meaningful benefit for the customer is a powerful part of every successful marketing strategy. Don’t even think of launching a new product or service without one.