Your unique selling proposition are the reasons that your customers buy from you instead of your competitors. These are often benefits that your products or services offer to it’s customers but sometimes it’s not limited to just about what your products and services offer. Sometimes it can be the support that you offer or the customer service practices you implement.
For example, Amazon.com bought Zappos.com for $928 million. Zappos sells shoes online. They have about the same selection as everyone else and they sell the same shoes as everyone else. So what makes them worth close to a billion dollars? Their customer services is amazing and this breeds a very high repeat sales and referral rate. One facet of this customer service is offering 2-way free shipping. If you order a shoe and it doesn’t fit or you don’t like it, return it at no cost to you (not even shipping back to Zappos.)
The company may also indirectly criticize or challenge their competition, such as in the case of M&M’s recent campaign slogan: “Melts in your mouth, not in your hand”. M&M’s is targeting competitor confectioners, accusing no one in specific of having chocolate treats that melt in the hands or are too messy to eat.
The original rules of the USP state that the proposition in the advertisement must be so strong that it motivates tens of thousands of new customers to purchase the product or sign up for the service. In the changing landscape of modern marketing, applying old techniques to new frontiers like internet marketing can sometimes lead to the most successful campaigns.
