Ever since George Bush said "strategery" in 2001, and maybe since the dawn of snake oil, any 
reasonable person could be forgiven for being skeptical when it comes to strategy.

Despite its regrettable use as a self-important catchall euphemism for slacking, strategic 
planning is still vital. Believing your business can build success solely on its founding 
visions and dispense with the bother of a formal business strategy is a risk no business can 
afford to assume. 

Who could blame savvy owners and managers for convincing themselves that detailed planning is
just for corporate bigwigs with time to sit in ornate offices and think fancy thoughts? Small 
means nimble and agile, not slow and ponderous.
 
Who would criticize the scrappy street fighters for taking a more informal and improvisational 
approach to selling products or services? The passion, the shoulder-to-the-grindstone ethic, 
and people-to-people skills of their close-knit workforces give them the edge to win. Right?
 
Wrong. No business can survive, much less thrive, without building a plan that spells 
out revenue and earnings targets as well as the way to achieving them. An effective strategic 
plan requires an expression of the challenges and opportunities that the business faces. It 
also requires clarity on the methods and means required to meet those challenges. And there's 
something else that's mandatory. Without it, all the planning in the world is pointless. 

Isn't That Special? In the film "City Slickers," Jack Palance asks Billy Crystal if he knows 
what the secret of life is. Crystal doesn't know. "Just one thing," Palance offers. Crystal asks
what it is. Palance's reply? "That's what you've got to find out." While taking the form of some
old cowboy's silly, circular riddle, it remains the essence of your strategic marketing. It may
also explain why people find marketing strategy so dubious. What senior management has to find 
out, and the entire organization embrace, is that one thing: that single most important reason 
why customers choose its offering.
 
That single reason is called the unique selling proposition (USP). And a frightening number 
of companies have no idea what their company's is. The USP must be distinguished from any sort 
of demand stimulus (like pricing or special offers), set of product features or even their 
attendant benefits. "Service" doesn't count, either—unless you can demonstrate how your service 
is unique. Despite so few companies' being able to articulate their USP, uncovering it is simple: 
find out what is the most important reason your customers choose you. I said simple, not easy. 
Uncovering the USP is the grunt work that drives the pilings that support your business into 
solid ground. It's digging out the customer sensibilities and values that define what you're 
doing to earn their business and make their business better.
 
Unfortunately, you can't uncover your firm's USP by yourself. You need a dispassionate third 
party, one who can do the archaeology and then document the critical motivating points of 
your customer's pain—which your offering fixed in its own unique way. You uncover your unique 
value when you understand why your customers pick you as the best of all available choices. This
work tells you how you're filling customer needs, solving customer problems or building value 
that improves your customers' profitability.
 
A strategic focus on the company's USP gets management to look beyond what the company is 
making or doing. It focuses management on what is unique about the business that generates 
revenue. That's the secret of life, so to speak, for the business. But it is a secret that 
can't stay concealed, because managers need to clearly communicate and sell the company's USP 
to all levels of the business. Clear understanding of the firm's USP is essential to achieving 
the goals and objectives of the business. 

Calistoga famously failed for believing they were in the covered wagon business and not in the 
transportation business. Conversely, it's doubtful anyone believes Starbucks is actually in the
coffee business. So, postpone the mission statement exercise until you are able to avoid falling
into the strategic trap of letting your industry, your competitors or your business function 
define who you are and what you do. Because performance expectations and results revolve around 
continual improvement in identifying and meeting customer needs, the value you provide to your 
customer should define your company and its vision.
 
What About the New Guy? Existing companies have a customer base from which they can glean the 
critical information that yields a USP. But new businesses have to do something else, something 
more, to figure out what makes them special. Often the startup has to wrest market share from 
somebody else, or find resources from prospects where none are appropriated. Thus, it's vital 
for startups to communicate their unique selling propositions with great specificity. With 
little or no customer base, how is that done? The new venture's USP will have to be compelling 
enough to motivate customers to do what they are loath to—change their behavior. It's not 
enough to simply have a better mousetrap—it must be credibly demonstrated, in a number of 
contexts and in a specific way—why the new mousetrap is better. 

This challenge makes startups different. They need to generate credibility but don't have the 
benefit of a track record. The best alternative to a history is an ironclad business case, one 
in which the venture demonstrates the superiority of its offering through a prototype or model 
that can, in turn, be documented, sampled or replicated. This is not a new idea, obviously. 
It is just a loose application of the scientific method. The critical difference between a 
good strategy and a poor one is the recognition that any introductory program has value only 
when it yields real, credible documentation and endorsements that can be observed and verified.
 
Credibility development depends on validating experience, not manipulating fear or vanity to 
convince people they need something they might easily do without. Affirming real value requires 
cost-benefit analysis benchmarked against the expense of doing nothing. Customer-based 
affirmation of a very specific value is how the new business can penetrate its target market. 
The smaller and more focused the target market, the easier and less expensive it is to credibly 
demonstrate value. Customers will switch when they feel the negative consequences of habit and 
inaction most keenly. Thermal-pane windows will be more attractive to people who feel the 
warm air leaking out of their jalousies and their power bill hemorrhaging as a result. 

A business strategy isn't a guarantee of success, but the lack of it virtually guarantees 
failure. Remember, conducting due diligence is a testing process, and the conclusions drawn 
from it could be flawed. But from those productive failures comes the wisdom needed for 
fine-tuning or doing a wholesale revision of your strategy. The more objective the analytical 
process and the more metrics applied to it, the greater the chance for success. 
 
Tom Barnes is CEO of Mediathink (http://www.mediathink.com/), a consultancy 
specializing in media and marketing strategy and implementation. Article sourced from 
http://www.marketingprofs.com/arch/index.asp 
May 10, 2005
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