What's Your UVP?

Every organizations I've ever worked for has pretty much had the same Vision statement and it goes something like this:
"We will be the premier (insert industry here) in the region, with the highest level of customer service possible."

Blah. Boring, and useless, if you are really trying to create a vision. How can employees see themselves in that? Lots of companies "strive for excellence" but every time I hear that phrase I think of Yoda ' "Try not. Do, or do not."

Your vision statement really needs to reflect your Unique Value Proposition - your UVP - because otherwise it is just another collection of fancy words. The UVP defines not only who you are as an organization, but what benefit you bring to your customers that they can't get anywhere else. Your UVP should be completely understood by all employees so that they can verbalize to your customers. It should be the underpinning for your entire marketing strategy, as well.

How do you find your UVP? For heaven's sake, don't ask your employees. They will have all kinds of ideas that sound reasonable but probably don't reflect your UVP. Instead, ask your customers. Ask the customers who left you, and the ones who aren't your customers. Ask why they chose you - or why they didn't. Ask them what it is about your company that makes you different. Ask a lot of them and write down their answers. If you are getting a lot of different answers that will tell you that your brand is not well established in the minds of your customers. It may tell you that your company hasn't distinguished itself yet as having a UVP. Either way, it indicates you have work to do in clarifying that vision.

If you are getting consistent answers, that tells you that your brand is understood. You may not be happy with what the brand is, but at least you know where you are starting from. If the results don't define your company in the same way you do, then you will need to do some gap analysis and figure out how to get there.

Your UVP is out there, somewhere. Finding it is your first step but then you must refine it and make it the basis of all you do whether that's writing a new Vision statement or creating a new ad campaign. Until you know your UVP, you may just be wasting a lot of resources in your marketing.

Did Online Kill Old Media?

It is trite to say that marketing is part art and part science. As marketers, we must use metrics, ROI, behavioral analysis and other scientific, concrete tools to deliver and measure campaigns. But what we do also requires creativity - writing, design, a "gut" feeling for what will work. We have to understand our audiences at both the logical and the psychological level, then figure out how to meet them at both places at once.

CEOs are looking for the results - what did we accomplish, how much did it cost, did we reach our goal. As marketers, we have to put those questions at the top of our lists, too. Where the struggle can come is in focusing only on the immediately measurable results. As we move into the age of online, on demand marketing we gain the ability to have near instant results on our marketing activities. That's an advantage we haven't had before. 

The temptation, of course, is to discard all the traditional media we have used - outdoor, print, tv, radio, etc. - in favor of something that can be precisely measured. But those "softer" and less measurable media have an important place in the marketing mix. They provide the opportunity to tell a more complete message, or to create an emotional response, even to make people think, cry, laugh. That's hard to do in a search engine ad or a 140-character tweet.

Building your brand requires a consistent, multi-faceted approach to explaining who you are and what you stand for. Over and over and over. It cannot be one and done, or you will lose whatever investment you made. Yes, you can definitely build brand through online marketing. And yes, you can do some amazing targeting online to reach out to your prospects and customers. But don't overlook the fact that not everyone is online, that everyone responds to different media in different ways, and that there's no substitute for meeting your customer where they are in that moment when they need your product or service.