How often have you heard that every business needs to be
different and unique to its competitors? In other words it has to have a USP.

You've probably heard of the marketing term USP. Unique selling proposition or
unique selling point.

Has the concept got a little pedestrian!?

Everyone claims to have one. Unfortunately the USP is often stated as  the company offers quality, speed or dependability. Features you'd want any company to provide as standard.

Having a USP is a good thing, if you get it right...

After all the attitude of trying to differentiate yourself from your
competition is a useful one for your prospects. It gives them something
they can latch onto to explain to themselves why they're buying
you.

The only problem with a USP is it's completely internally
focused. We're telling the customer how we're different.

We're saying we're special because we're the lowest priced, or we
offer a 20 year guarantee or we offer the largest range of colours
and so on.

Introducing the UCP

In addition to understanding why you're different you need to
create your own Unique Customer Position or UCP.

Your UCP is oriented towards your customers. So for example.
Let's say your USP is currently "we service more cars than any
other garage in the community."

That has no customer orientation to it, does it?

The UCP could be "we help customers to keep their cars in top
mechanical shape for longer."

That UCP addresses the customer concern that they want their cars
to be at their peak of performance for as long as possible before
needing another service.

That's a lot more interesting for a customer compared to the USP
of "we service more cars than any other garage in the community."

This idea of a Unique Customer Position is applicable to any
business and any industry,

The other point about having a unique customer position is that
you can easily use it during a sales call as the customer
immediately understands what you're talking about and the benefit
to them.

I don't think anyone else has ever used the term Unique Customer
Position in this context so you're heard it here first.