While perhaps everyone knows that there are businesses that are successful and those that aren’t, many businesses (especially the ones that could do with a little more support from their customers) would be wondering why they aren’t attracting more customers.
One can see it all around us – one medical store will be filled with people whereas another one just down the street would have no customers. One bank versus another bank or one restaurant versus another restaurant.
The key thing every business – large and small – has to realize is that it has to have a unique reason for being. The reason why a new customer walks in or why an existing customer keeps coming back. The customers will keep walking in as long as the business has an answer to this critical question – “why should my customer choose me and not my competitor”.
One more restaurant serving north Indian food in a street that is full of north Indian restaurants might not cut ice. However, it would be a different matter altogether if the new restaurant becomes the first one serving Gujarati cuisine.
It is a simple logic that a business needs a unique proposition but it’s quite amazing how tens of thousands of businesses ignore the basic principle of business growth.
Does my business have something that my competitors do not have? Obviously the differentiator has to be important for the customers. And this unique proposition could be related to product (plastic buckets stronger than any other bucket in the market), service (door delivery of medicines anytime of day or night), price (half-price sale through the year), relationship (have we ever let you down in the last 12 years?) or fine segmentation (everything for kids below 12 months of age).
It obviously is not easy to find the unique proposition for the business. Advertising Guru David Ogilvy once said, ‘interrogate the product until it confesses to its strengths’ – this indeed would be the starting point for zeroing in on the unique business proposition. If the business does not have a unique differentiator that is important for the customers, create one. Because, a “me-too” product stands no chance in this competitive world.
