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Blog posts tagged Peter Jones
USPs? Piece of cake…
February 17, 2010
USP is much beloved on the Dragon’s Den. Often you’ll hear Peter Jones saying: “I like that, that’s your USP.” USP, of course, stands for unique selling point (or proposition).
To explain USPs, I’ll tell you a personal story. When I started my first business more than 20 years ago, I went on a high-growth, business start-up programme. The guy who was teaching us about marketing was obsessed with USPs.
Problem was, he was trying to apply multi-national corporate thinking to my small start-up. His approach was totally inappropriate. I was going to be doing the selling myself and he wanted to construct a fake sales pitch for me that followed a big business template.
Glasgow approach
If you’ve been to one of these start-up seminars, you’ll know there’s always some bloke or woman standing there telling you how important your USP is. So how do you identify your USP?
Well, today, you’re going to get the Glasgow guide to USPs. In other words, straight forward, no messing around.
Basically, a USP is something that makes your product or service different. It enables you to charge more or sell more because it separates you from the competition. A USP allows you to you make more money as a result of the competitive edge it gives you.
How do you find your USP? There’s only one way – get people to sample your product or service and listen to what they say. In the words of Gary Vaynerchuk – you “conversate”. You talk and you listen. Listen, listen, listen.
Matter of taste
Making cakes was my first business and the guy who was running the start-up course I went on asked me what my USP was. I simply stuck a slice of cake in front of him, he had a bite and replied: “Ooh - that’s delicious”.
My chocolate cake was vastly rich. It was made of pure chocolate, raw cane sugar, good chocolate shavings on the top, no preservatives, no additives and extremely high quality. That tells you that my cake was special, aimed at the top end of the market. It didn’t look perfect, so I stressed its homemade qualities, giving it a sense of authenticity and wholesomeness, both powerful USPs.
When you’re trying to find your USP, you need to identify something that makes your product, service or business distinctive. How do you do it? As I did with my cake, you should take your product or service and shove it in front of people as much and as often as you can. Ask people what they like best about your offer. You might find that certain phrases and words will be repeated. In the case of my chocolate cake, it was, “My God, very rich!” and “Wow – really chocolaty”.
Ever heard of Kobi beef? It’s the world’s most expensive beef – I think it’s looked after by nuns or whatever. Actually, I’m kidding, it comes from the black Tajima-ushi breed of Wagyu cattle, which is raised strictly by traditional methods. It’s renowned for its flavour, tenderness and fatty, well-marbled texture. Its rarity and great care taken in its rearing are powerful USPs, as well as its flavour and succulence. Its price is another USP (“The world’s most expensive meat”).
In conclusion
Does your business/product/service need a USP? Absolutely. Whether it’s chocolate cake or Japanese beef that you’re selling, if you can come up with something that marks your product and business out as different – as special – you’ve already got an important head start.
Iain Scott, Enterprise Café
Keeping up with the Joneses
October 20, 2009
Monday morning saw an early start for your intrepid blogger and a trip to the BT Tower in London for the Small Business Week launch event. The Business Pulse survey results were revealed and were duly followed by a series of talks from the likes of Lord Digby Jones and Peter Jones.
The recurring theme of the talks was that of adaptability and innovation. During the recession, innovative small businesses have adapted to survive; they had to, and will continue to do so as and when we climb out of it. But what of innovation? What does innovation mean to those at the forefront of helping start-ups come to fruition?
Peter Jones was the most outspoken on such matters. “Not a lot of people know what innovation is. If people with a small business want to innovate, hear this; innovation is basically doing things better than your competition”. Television's highest profile Dragon spoke of the lack of skills training in the UK and how this is inhibiting innovation. To highlight the sorry state of affairs, Peter Jones explained how the first ever academy for training entrepreneurs with the required skills was set up by himself a year ago. Not so much filling a gap in the market but plugging a gaping hole in the country's skill-set.
“The skills necessary to start a business–we don't teach them in this country. I started the first National Enterprise Academy and boy was I shocked–the first–only a year ago. We never had one. We don't have any academy that teaches enterprise in Britain apart from mine. I think that sums up where we are.”
“We need more practical skills resonating down to seven and eight year-old children. That's where we need to start. We need to be reading them books, not about Jack and Jill. We need to be reading books about Jack who starts up his flower shop. I read to my kids and I make them up.”
So the education system is holding back the skills and stifling innovative entrepreneurial growth and we need a reappraisal of how we stoke the fires of inspiration for our innovative entrepreneurs of the future. Now if you excuse me, I am just perfecting my Dragon's Den pitch for a children's television programme, 'Little Bo Peep and the impending tax return deadline.'
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