Perception is Reality - Marketing Profits 4.0

The Reality and Perception of Your Business

"Perception is Reality" Lee Atwater

Your Unique Value Proposition

Your UVP is that distinct and appealing idea that sets you and your business, or practice, favorably apart from every other generic competitor and motivates the consumer to begin a relationship with you earlier rather than later.

Your UVP is often hidden from both your view and your prospect's view. When we work with clients our UVP discovery process can sometimes take hours. We need to wade through all the platitudes*, what we affectionately refer to as SWWCs, (So What Who Cares) that have come to be considered meaningful.

Phrases such as "highest quality", "best service" and "world class" all fall into the platitude camp.

To develop your USP focus on the one niche, need or gap that is most sorely lacking, provided you can keep the promise you make.

Use the problems, issues and opportunities you identified in your target market research to help you identify the most important issue.

•Your UVP should be concise and you will need to continue to work at developing it until you have a clearly defined, clearly apparent Unique Value Proposition a customer can immediately seize upon.

And then, integrate your USP into every marketing aspect of your business, such as your website, direct mail and field selling.

*A platitude is a trite, meaningless, biased or prosaic statement that is presented as if it were significant and original. The word is derived from the French word "plat" which means flat.

Is Your UVP Hidden?

Probably not. As the model below shows, your UVP or "inside reality" is likely being hidden behind a wall of crappy marketing!

To remedy this you must master the Essential Processes of Finding, Getting and Keeping and of course the Marketing Equation.

MarketingProfits4.0 Success Principle

The company with the best marketing and mastery of the 4 Essential Processes always wins. Inferior products and services often gain larger success and produce higher profits. PC vs. Mac and VHS vs. Betamax are just two well known examples in recent history.

More recently one can look to the wild success of the "for profit" University of Phoenix. Does UOP deliver a better product? From my research the answer is "no". Have they mastered the 4 Essential Processes and the Marketing Equation? Yes. Absolutely yes.

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