2 market research tools you can use to get comfortable with the unique value proposition (“UVP”) you select for your brand are customer interviews and PPC advertising.
Brand differentiation is critical
You absolutely must create a singular, meaningful, point of difference in your brand in order to compete and to get noticed by customers. If your brand merely stands for what other brands stand for, or doesn’t do anything special to change the shopping behavior of customers in your category, you’re going to find your ability to compete lacking and your cash flow and sales will follow.
When you have a solid unique value proposition, it should make your marketing planning easy-peasy. Being different will allow you to create strategies and tactics that reinforce your brand and that strengthen your positioning.
Committing to a point of difference can be scary
So what if you’ve come to the realization that your existing brand isn’t competing as effectively as it could be because you lack a singular, meaningful point of difference.
You need to change.
Not only is change scary, however, but changing from being one among a familiar crowd or category, to one who stands above that crowd can be downright frightening for many business owners.
But safe is boring. If audacious means doing the same things that your competition does but differently than them, or doing things that your competition does not do, then creating an audacious brand is where the opportunities lie.
Use market research to manage uncertainty and to reduce risk
Fortunately, there are a couple of steps you can take to overcome your fears of being different. In fact, there’s an entire industry devoted to helping business owners reduce uncertainty and manage exposure to risk: that industry is called market research.
Two low cost ideas I have for you to test a new unique value proposition are:
1. Customer interviews – Select 5 of your ideal customers to interview for 15 minutes each. Ask them the following questions:
- Why did you buy us in the first place?
- What do we do that others don’t?
- What could our products do for you that they don’t?
- Why do you stay with us?
- Do you refer us? If yes, why? If no, why not?
- What phrase(s) would you use to search for our products online?
- If I told you our brand was/did _____, would you agree?
- What could our products do for you that would make (g) more true?
What you’re looking for in these interviews are themes and stories that your best customers have created about your brand. These should be the benefits and features that make you different and special as compared to your competition.
You may learn that you don’t need to change your brand’s unique value proposition as much as you need to start enhancing an element that already exists. If you do need to change, these insights can help you understand how to increase the value of your brand and allow you to start building and enhancing the meaningful points of difference.
2. Pay-per-click (“PPC”) advertising – Where customer interviews will provide you with softer, qualitative insights and stories, pay-per-click advertising tests of your unique value proposition can provide more rigorous, “real-life” comparative results. After all, your ad will be limited to a short and succinct description of your brand’s value that competes for attention and clicks against competition.
Let’s say you have 3 different ideas of what your unique value proposition could be. You could create ads for all 3, run them for the same duration, and pick the ad with the highest click-through rate as the winner.
If you have some experience with PPC advertising and know how to manage your spending, you could then take the winning ad and split test it by rewording the UVP in an attempt to beat the performance of the original winner.
If you have an ecommerce site, you could also measure your conversion rates on your test landing pages and calculate the UVP that generates the greatest sales level. Since the main reason to craft a strong unique value proposition is to better compete and attract more sales, you could argue that the UVP that generates the highest level of sales is of most value to your brand.
No research will give you 100% certainty
Market research isn’t meant to give you 100% certainty in a competitive market. It can be used, however, to give you more information and help you make better decisions.
If you have crafted a meaningful unique value proposition and aren’t afraid of building your brand around it, then by all means, go forth and express your audacious brand. There’s no time like the present to get building your brand and business.
Have you done research to strengthen or change your brand's unique value proposition?