From the Desk of John Kumpunen:

What is your Unique Selling Positioning?

When Rosser Reeves explained USP (he called it Unique Selling Proposition) in his book Reality in Advertising, it really stuck like bubble-gum in kid’s hair. And rightly so, it’s a milestone in salesmanship thinking. Still many have no idea what it is.

Or they fail to understand its importance in any competitive arena. In web selling it’s paramount. What other arena do millions of pages from your competitors come up in seconds?

Unique = means exactly that. Unique. Nobody else is doing it, saying it, promoting it. If your competitors can make the same or similar claim, it’s not unique.

Selling = means that the feature or characteristic has to relate to sales and more important hopefully to the top three decision criteria in the purchase decision.

Positioning = I’ll put a bit of Ries and Trout here. Their ‘positioning’ reinforces the previous point about selling better than Reese’s original word ‘proposition’. Positioning puts the concept deeper into the mind of the buyer, I think.

That’s right. Now let’s try to wrap the whole thing into one thought.

Unique Selling Positioning in my business is a design, phrase, tested selling sentence, mnemonic or any other characteristic or feature or benefit that is 1. not claimed by any competitor 2. is an important feature or benefit to the buyer and 3. clearly and obviously distinguishes my business/product as different from those of the competitors.

It has enough persuasive power to make or break the sale, it is something that is vital to the purchase decision. It is also a feature that is easily positioned in the mind of the buyer by being memorable, interesting, and very close to what Ogilvy called the Big Idea.

IMPORTANT: Read my post on Why do we need marketing (top left box).

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