Why clarity and simplicity are the new USPs.

I sometimes get asked “what do you think our USPs should be?” 

It’s an easy one to answer, because I don’t actually believe in USPs. 

Why not, you may ask? Aren’t USPs one of the most important elements of the marketing toolkit?

There two main reasons. The first and most important is that they don’t exist. Or at the most they exist for a short period of time. What you can develop and take to market, someone else can too. 

The second reason is this: when you talk about your USPs, you’re talking about yourself. We’ve all had situations where we meet people who talk about themselves, and it’s just plain boring. You switch off. Your mind starts to wander. 

So when you talk about your business as ‘the best’ or how great your people are (which they may well be), your target customer switches off. This is bad news. If your prospects switches off, they won’t engage with your message, and you will lose a sale. 

How can you solve this problem? The key is to understand how peoples’ brains work.  

Our brains are designed to help us survive. They are constantly on the lookout for any opportunity to save energy (thinking uses up a lot of energy). So any message that uses up unnecessary energy will be ignored. That’s why simplicity and clarity are so important (more important than ever, as we are exposed to over 3,000 commercial messages every day).

People aren’t interested in your product’s features and benefits. They are interested in solutions to their problems. So to get people’s attention, you first have to demonstrate that you understand what their problem actually is. 

Let’s say you have great people who offer great service. Rather than saying “We have the best people who offer the best service”, you could say “Show your people how much you care”, which is much more powerful because it addresses a problem that all leaders have – how do I look after my people? Eureka! By finding a workspace provider who has great people who offer great service.*

The other thing to remember is this. People have to hear something 8 times before they will remember it. How many times do you think you have to tell someone something, for them to hear it 8 times? Maybe fifty? A hundred?

Therefore the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is to send out too many messages, to too many different audiences. 

Simplicity and clarity are the keys to successful messaging. 

*The more eagle-eyed among you will have noticed the similarity between this line and the line from the new John Lewis ad. I thought of it first (really).