Design Thinking Methods - Part 3: USP Battlefield
In our series "Design Thinking for your B2B Marketing" we present helpful tools that support you in your strategic marketing. This is about the USP Battlefield, which you can use to find your unique selling propositions (UPSs).
Design thinking is a creative approach to solving problems and developing new ideas from a customer perspective. Use the agile methods of this way of working to move your B2B marketing forward.
1. What are USPs at all?
Unique value propositions of your solutions and products that set you apart from the offerings of your market competitors are also called Unique Selling Points (USPs for short). USPs can be unique products and services, but also a distinctive image.
The problem is often that "good price", "top quality" or "fast response" are already misunderstood as USPs. The USP Battlefield helps you to separate your true USPs from supposed USPs. It distinguishes the benefits as follows:
- Basic benefit
Basic benefit for the customer (my wheel is round) - Additional benefit
Additional benefit that does not yet represent a unique selling proposition vis-à-vis competitors (my wheel runs on a ball bearing) - true USP
Unique brand promise and customer benefit (my bike is lighter than others)
2. How you your true USPs find out
Use the USP Battlefield!
The USP Battlefield supports you in this process by filtering out the quintessence from a multitude of your supposed Unique Selling Points. You can find out exactly how this works in the following:
- Draw a Battlefield by drawing two axes: x-axis (relevance to the customer) and y-axis (degree of uniqueness). Divide the field into four quadrants, as in our Blaupause template.
- Now, in small groups or alone, collect 5-10 features each that you would classify as a USP.
- Now it gets interesting! Place the collected features in order on the USP battlefield, ranking the supposed USPs according to the degree of your uniqueness and relevance to the customer.
- Find your true USPs now by focusing only on the upper quadrants! Be critical! You should sort out until you ideally end up with a maximum of one USP per target group or per product (that's why it's "unique") in one of the top two quadrants.
This tool is as simple as it is ingenious. Try it out!
If you want to learn more about Design Thinking and effective tools, check out the other parts of our Design Thinking series! For example, about the background of Design Think ing and the Canvas tool or how the Customer Journey helps you to convince your leads at all touchpoints!
Yvonne Willmer
At Blaupause , my main task is to structure and manage complex projects for industrial clients. From time to time, however, I also write blog articles and social media posts on B2B topics that are close to my heart. Have you already put some of our suggestions into practice? Then I would be happy if you tell me about your results.