Here’s How to Make Your Business Unique and Guarantee Success

You have 3 options

If you want your business to be successful, you need a way to make it stand out. There are millions of businesses in the world and hundreds that are trying to offer the same product as you. Whether you’re a content creator, running a technology business, or you own a local restaurant, you have to show your customers that you offer something they can’t get anywhere else.

That’s the only way to stand out from your competition and win. You have to be unique. You don’t need to offer everything, you just need to be the very best at offering your unique value. It all starts with your value proposition.

The Value Proposition

The value proposition is the value that your business promises to deliver to customers when they buy from you. For example, Apple’s value proposition with their Macbooks is that customers get a well-designed computer that “just works” all the time.

In order to succeed, you must make this value unique for your customers and distinct from your competition. That way, your customers know exactly what they’re buying from you and that they can’t get it from your competitors. Instead of competing with other businesses, you’re creating your own space with your own distinct offering.

There are 3 ways to make your value proposition unique:

• Serve a specific set of customers
• Solve a specific problem for your customers
• Sell at a specific price point

We will cover each of these in detail along with real-world examples.

Serve a specific set of customers

Elderly people like different things than younger people. People who spend loads of time on social media have different interests than those who play sports. You can’t appeal to everyone, but you can ensure that you deliver the absolute best product to a specific demographic.

Define the demographic that your business will serve and stick to it. Don’t worry, you’ll still have a multi-billion dollar market to serve to. You can then focus on perfecting your product to serve top value to your specific set of customers, rather than trying to serve every one with just average value. You must be a master of your trade rather than a jack of all.

Real-World Example

Walmart actually started out by only servicing small towns with populations below 10,000. Because the towns were so distant and had fewer people, most other retailers stayed away. As a result, Walmart dominated that niche and took all of the small towns. They made sure they delivered top value there too by making a single store that all town customers could rely on for all products including groceries, clothing, working tools, and other essentials.

Solve a specific problem

You won’t be able to solve all of your customer's problems at the same time.

Let’s say that you have a company that sells wireless headphones that “are good for music, phone calls, and noise-cancelling”. The problem is that all 3 of those things require different features in the headphones. People will look at your product and get confused, wondering just how good your product is for each feature.

Products are rarely good at everything, they usually have strengths and weaknesses. People want to know what solution they’re getting when they buy from you: is it good music, good phone calls, or good noise-cancelling? In order to make that very clear, make sure your business solves a specific problem for them.

Define the problem you’re going to solve for your customers, then make that the core focus of both your marketing and your product strategy. Just pick one single thing and solve the absolute heck out of it. Your solution must be the absolute highest value out there on the market: the best music OR the best phone calls OR the best noise-cancelling. Your customers will notice this and buy from you only because your solution is the best.

Real-World Example

Squarespace allows users to quickly create a website while taking care of all hosting, templates, e-commerce, and email marketing functionality on the backend. They’re focused on offering the solution of a very quick and easy way to set up a website that just works without much hassle. WordPress has a far more extensive list of templates and features for e-commerce and email. But Squarespace is able to thrive by focusing on offering a solution that is fast and easy, rather than the one with the most features.

Sell at a specific price point

Some customers want cheap things because they only need minimal features. Some are willing to pay a premium to get the whole package. Some like it in the middle. In order for your business to succeed, aim for just one.

If you only sell premiums, like say, Apple with their new iPad Pro, then your customers know for sure that you’re the company that sells premium things for a higher price (you’ll never see a cheap Apple product!). They know that to get a premium product, they should always go to you. The flip side works well too. People know they can pick up a cheaper tablet from Huawei or Samsung that isn’t a premium, but that’s what they want anyway. They know to go to those companies if they want to save money.

Customers like to look at your business and know exactly what they’re getting. If you sell the entire range of products from cheap to premium, they’ll be left wondering whether you’re any good at either one. You must focus on a single price type: cheap, average, or premium, so your customers always know what they’re getting.

Real-World Example

Traditional airlines like Delta and American Airlines sell all kinds of services from cheap economy to premium first-class. In order to stand out, Southwest airlines focused on low-cost, no-frills offerings. They frequently fly into secondary airports (which are cheaper to land in) that many of their competitors don’t, a nice convenience for customers. They have open seating, so when you board the plane, you can sit anywhere you want. That first-come, first-serve style with no reservations allows them to keep prices low. They also skip out on the food and drinks, again to save costs because cheap customers don’t want them.

In Summary

If you want your business to succeed, you need to find a way to make it unique, to stand out to your customers. You do that by making your marketing and product strategy aimed at offering a unique value proposition. There are 3 ways to do this.

• Serve a specific set of customers — pick your demographic target and focus on offering the best value to those specific people
• Solve a specific problem — decide on the customer need you will meet and make sure your business offers the absolute best solution
• Sell at a specific price point — pick premium, middle, or cheap so you can create the best offering for customers interested in that specific price point

Like to learn?

Subscribe to the Mighty Knowledge email list for access to exclusive content.