I always cringe a little when I hear folks talk casually about developing a brand and UVP. They’ve become buzzwords which businesses come to value over measurable gains. “Sure we lost money last year,” I’ll hear, “But we made great strides in establishing the brand, and getting our UVP out there.” The UVP, in case you are blessed enough not to have been inundated with it, is a Unique Value Proposition.
If there is such a thing as a UVP – and I’ll get to that in a bit – both brand and value should be linked to what you do well. You don’t craft a business around your brand & UVP – it’s the other way round. But it sounds like such a shortcut, that it proves irresistible. I’ll rant about brand identity some other time, for now I’d like to examine the very concept of the UVP – and the traps inherent in building one.
A Unique Value Proposition should be some sort of capsule statement which both differentiates you, and highlights the value you bring to your customers. A UVP is generic – it shouldn’t matter who you are speaking to. And there’s the rub. One of the first things I learned as a marketing guy, was that the sales guys & gals already knew that the UVP was not useful to them. Instead, they wanted a Unique Selling Proposition – a statement of specific value brought to a specific customer, which gave a leg up on the competition. Makes sense – what does the customer need that you can do better than the other company.
The immediate problem with a USP was that it was specific – both to the customer and the selling environment. A generic UVP is little more than the starting point. But that realization is key to effectively using a UVP – it needs to be an umbrella statement, which you can expand upon and make appealing to the one person you need to impact.
Getting into Account management, and encountering the three general types of individuals you meet in any target organization – access contacts, specifiers and deciders – made me further realize the limitations of the UVP. There is a very different appeal needed for each of those contacts, and a generic UVP won’t cut it. You need to craft three very different messages – and because your contact may cross over roles – the messages need to be intertwined. Oh, and you may need to turn it into a USP in order to close the deal.
I’m not saying that you don’t need a UVP – merely that it is misunderstood. In an effective selling organization the UVP may seldom be witnessed in it’s original state. And of course, it – and all variants – need to continually evolve with your organization.
