USP,PA,CA,USA, It's too much to keep up with! CORRECTED -- Small Businesses Discussion Forum

[ Show ]

Support VoyForums

[ Shrink ]

VoyForums Announcement: Programming and providing support for this service has been a labor of love since 1997. We are one of the few services online who values our users' privacy, and have never sold your information. We have even fought hard to defend your privacy in legal cases; however, we've done it with almost no financial support -- paying out of pocket to continue providing the service. Due to the issues imposed on us by advertisers, we also stopped hosting most ads on the forums many years ago. We hope you appreciate our efforts.

Show your support by donating any amount. (Note: We are still technically a for-profit company, so your contribution is not tax-deductible.) PayPal Acct: Feedback:

Donate to VoyForums (PayPal):

[ Login ] [ Contact Forum Admin ] [ Main index ] [ Post a new message ] [ Search | Check update time | Archives: 1, 2, [3], 4, 5, 6 ]

Subject: USP,PA,CA,USA, It's too much to keep up with! CORRECTED

Author:
Dennis S. Vogel

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Date Posted: 16:21:15 05/26/17 Fri
In reply to: SidK 's message, "USP,PA,CA,USA, It's too much to keep up with!" on 10:15:27 05/23/01 Wed

Hi Sid:

Some people treat them as the same. They're similar. The biggest word for each of them is UNIQUE! If your business is like any others, there's no real reason for customers to buy from you (unless they can get to your business more easily).

If you offer exactly the same products & services as competitors, people could choose you at random & get the same benefits. If that's the case, you're relying on the chance of being chosen. I'd prefer to sell by design, not by chance.

There's definite overlap among these terms.

Here's how I define them -

Unique selling proposition: What are you offering that your competitors aren't offering? Maybe they're able to, but so far they haven't. For example - Bayer aspirin focuses on relieving pain but even more, taking aspirin can help to prevent heart-attacks. Any aspirin product can do these.

Preventing heart-attacks is something Tylenol (non-aspirin pain reliever) can't do, so compared to acetaminophen, aspirin has a unique selling proposition.

Unique buying advantage: What advantage do customers think they get by buying from you instead of from your competitors. (This can be used as a basis of referral marketing.) It's something customers already believe about your business, product/service without much if any prompting from you. For example - Tums has calcium, but Rolaids doesn't. (Doctors helped this a lot.)

Unique selling advantage: What do you want prospects to accept as a clear advantage. For example - "When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight. Fed Ex." It was unique until the US Postal Service and UPS matched it.

Pre-emptive advantage: In a highly competitive/commodity environment, one competitor finds something about itself that the others haven't figured out yet. The others could also claim it if they realized it. Avis car rental used to boast its service lines were shorter than Hertz's. National and Budget car rentals could have claimed the same thing and still could if they wanted to seem like copy-cats.

Competitive advantage: Wal-Mart stores are typically set up near the edges of cities so they'll be close to major highways, so the trucks can get to the stores easily. In some cities, this is a low population area. Since Wal-Mart put a lot of money into its locations, it probably won't move a store (it has in some cases). So, W-M can't do much about its stores' distances from customers' homes.

Positioning: This is the picking order in a business category. Somebody wants to deal with the top company in a category, s/he will probably pick the number two company if the number one company is unavailable.

"Avis is number two, why pick us? We try harder." If people didn't want to wait in a long line for a Hertz car, they may just go for the number two company. The "We try harder" part is just a nice little touch, but it's the number two positioning that made it successful for Avis until it changed its focus and lost momentum.

Trying harder isn't enough to win a marketing battle. The road to hell is being paved with good intentions & the people who try harder are doing the paving. Trying harder is OK if the effort creates enough of the value people will pay for.

Branding: The biggest effort in marketing is to get people to think of brand name when a business, product or service category comes to mind. Which brand comes to mind when you think about computers? That's branding.

Inherent Drama: This is another element we could add, which I reduce down to ID, because if you have an inherent drama in your business, product/service it should be used as a form of identity.

This conversation was used in a commercial decades ago:
Girl 1: "Here he comes. Give me another Certs, mine is gone."
Girl 2: "Do this. (slurping/sucking sound) Do you feel that cool, fresh feeling?"
Girl 1: "Yeah."
Girl 2: "That means Certs is still working."

Then Girl 1 is confident the boy of her dreams won't be offended by bad breath. Certs had, maybe still has, the inherent drama (ID) of lasting breath freshness.

I like to include ways to apply information I provide, but these subjects have so many variables, it would take a lot of space to provide practical applications of these other than the examples I gave.

Thank you for using my blog.
Please let me know if you need any clarifications.
Dennis S. Vogel
thrivingbusiness@email.com
No competitor is invincible. You don't need
a miracle. Your business will THRIVE if you
have the right marketing.
Please click here for free information.
https://thriving-small-businesses.blogspot.com/
http://www.voy.com/31049/

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Replies:

Subject	Author	Date
Your Central Marketing Theme Should Be Like A Lens	Dennis S. Vogel	16:46:29 05/26/17 Fri