What's your USP? Don't know, or worse still, you've never heard of it. USP is an acronym for Unique Selling Proposition. It's vital for every business to identify its inherent USP or if it can't identify it, to create it.
If yours is a firm that sells gold coated widgets and there are NO other firms selling
same product, then you need not worry about your USP - you have one by default. The default being that you have a market monopoly.
Provided product is in demand, you can charge just about any price you like and you have no worries with competition. Your product is unique - that's your USP.
But say your business is installing airconditioners and there are six other firms doing same thing in your region. What's your USP? This is where it gets difficult.
You don't have an inherent USP, so you need to create it. If other firms provide same range of airconditioners and prices are reasonably comparable, then you need to do one or more of following:
.Reduce or increase your prices .Provide better service .Add value to your products or service
Reducing your price is usually unacceptable as is increasing your price, although with latter, you may decide to specialise in a higher cost product and look for a niche market with larger amounts of disposable income eg, Baby Boomers.
Alternatively, you may decide to focus on commercial airconditioning installation.
While it's not always easy to juggle prices and product range - after all, there are only so many different brands of airconditioner - providing better service and adding value to your products or services presents numerous opportunities. Let's consider a few.
Here's an example of an experience I had where a firm added value to it's product. Although it happened many years ago, it is still relevant. My wife and I had our first child and realised within days that our old twin tub washing machine wouldn't be much use washing dozens of nappies every week, so we invested in a Hoover automatic top loading machine. When it was delivered, delivery man unpacked it, set it up in our laundry and then gave us a demonstration on how to work it.
