Imagine that you want to buy a pair of mittens. All these shops sell mittens. Their products seem to be all alike, which one will you choose? The cheapest one, of course. When they’re all alike, you go for the price.

Here’s a new shop. Mittens in five colors! More expensive, but come one, five colours! Isn’t that awesome? And suddenly the price is less important.

The new shop has a USP, a Unique Selling Point; unique because the other shops don’t have it and a selling point because it is a benefit to customers. This is important, so I’ll take it again: A USP is a customer benefit that the competition can’t deliver. Everyone wants a USP.

A USP is obviously good for the shop because they will sell more, and their customers will focus less on price and be more loyal. It is also good for customers because they get more alternatives to choose from, and when one shop has a USP, the other shops will work hard to also improve their offers, which creates even more value for customers.

A simple USP is easy to communicate – everyone will remember the shop FIVE and why they bought mittens there.

So, USPs are great! But… it’s not quite so easy.

A simple USP is usually simple to copy. And as soon as the copies turn up, everyone is back to where they started with a price race to the bottom.

For us at NCAB, our competitors come in very different shapes. Having our own staff in factories can be unique compared to traders, but not compared to factories. Our local sale office is unique compared to factories, but not compared to traders.

And PCBs are definitely more complicated than mittens. It would be hard to find a simple feature that benefits all our very different customers.

So, we need another plan. To be explained in the next lesson.