Who are you? What do other people appreciate about you? What good do you do in the world?
And maybe the most difficult question of all: Do other people see you the same way you see yourself?
When we’re faced with these kinds of existential questions within ourselves, there are many ways to handle it. We ask our family, we talk to our friends, we go to therapy. And if we don’t reach out to others for help, we call it something else: mid-life crisis.
But every business struggles with these same questions at one time or another. How do our customers view us? How would they describe the value we provide? Yet, most businesses never seek help in answering them. They’ll talk to their C-suite, their product teams, sales. But when someone suggests asking customers directly, they’re met with awkward silence. Instead, businesses continue telling their customers what they should like about them. Cue the mid-life crisis.
Crystallizing a unique selling proposition (USP) is hard.
When you’re immersed in your own brand, your own work, your own history, the signal can get blurry. What feels obvious internally isn’t often what resonates externally.
Thoughtform recently faced this same challenge: How can we summarize what makes us different in one or two sentences that resonate with our clients? We had a lot of opinions, that’s for sure. Even in a small firm like Thoughtform, you’ll find a range of ideas about what the company stands for. Strategy design, design thinking, deep collaboration, creating sticky change, experience design, listening well, developing a nuanced understanding of clients—each stakeholder had a slightly different angle on what’s essential. All of them are right…but they can’t all be the headline.
Still, gathering these internal perspectives is a critical starting point. Patterns do emerge, and those themes help you understand the DNA of the company—the beliefs and behaviors that consistently show up regardless of project, team, or client.
But here’s the trap: believing internal perspective is the same as customer perspective. Many companies build internal groups to represent “the voice of the customer.” Yet unless that group is talking to dozens (ideally hundreds) of actual customers every year, it’s not really representing the customer voice. “We know our customers. We’ve been doing this for years.” That’s the refrain.
At Thoughtform, we resisted that trap.
We took early versions of potential USPs to trusted client partners and asked them what resonated—and what didn’t. And they were refreshingly candid. (Spoiler alert: We don’t know what our customers think about us as well as we like to believe.)
For starters, we learned something interesting about how many of our clients view the value of creativity. While we often talk about creative design related to the visual and innovative output we provide for our clients, it’s our creative approach that many of our clients appreciate most. The ways that we blend design thinking with management consulting to turn a typical strategy and experience development process on its head and draw the most unexpected conclusions from their collective knowledge.
More importantly, however, nearly all our clients highlighted the value of clarity: using design methodology to make sense of complex organizational questions and bring clarity to the chaos. We heard over and over how our ability to cut through the corporate noise and chart a clear path forward has been the key factor in many of our clients’ ability to achieve their goals. As such, we knew our USP needed to express our value as clearly and succinctly as possible.
The remarkable part? Customers want to be asked.
When they sense that their input will genuinely shape something meaningful, they lean in. After incorporating their feedback, we brought an evolved version back to the same clients. They were energized to see their fingerprints on the work. Their support meant a lot, and it meaningfully strengthened the outcome.
This is what most businesses don’t get about asking their clients for feedback. They assume that doing so puts an undue burden on clients or makes them less likely to see you as an expert. But for us it had the opposite impact. Consider the Ben Franklin Effect. When you do a favor for someone else, it creates a deeper relationship between you, and you more likely to trust them in the future. By asking for help, you show them that you truly value their perspective, not just as a short-term customer, but as a long-term partner.
And the Thoughtform USP that came out of this work? “We design strategies and experiences to create change that lasts.”
It reflects who we are—and who our clients say we are.
Does your USP convey what makes your company different as clearly and powerfully as it could? Reach out to our principal Steve Frank, and we would be happy to help you evaluate your current USP and help you capture what truly makes you unique.