Your USP doesn’t come from you.

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 friends, we talk to our family, we go to therapy. But if we don’t reach out to others for help, we call it something else: mid-life crisis.

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 their customers directly, they’re met with awkward silence. Instead, they continue telling their customers what they should like about their business.

Cue the mid-life crisis.

The lie of internal expertise

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 often isn’t what resonates externally.

That’s the challenge Thoughtform faced this year: 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 deep, nuanced understanding of clients—each stakeholder has 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 that internal perspective is the same as the customer’s perspective.

It’s not.

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. In lean times, this blind spot only grows—customer insights gathering is often one of the first things cut. “We know our customers. We’ve been doing this for years.” That’s the refrain.

Designing our own USP

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 heard over and over that how we were describing ourselves was just too generic. That you could say the same thing about any other strategy firm. But that our true value lies in our creative uniqueness. That we bring an out-of-the-box perspective that they just can’t get with any other partner.

Even more interesting was the way our clients define the value of creativity. While we often talk about the value of our creative design in the visual and innovative output we provide for our clients, it’s our creative approach that many of our clients really value. The ways that we blend design thinking with management consulting to turn their typical strategy and experience development processes on their heads and draw the most unexpected conclusions from their collective knowledge. It’s that kind of creativity that makes us a one-of-a-kind partner for our clients.

All of these perspectives—and many more—helped shape our new USP and the way we describe ourselves to our customers.

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. We had 100% participation—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 this actually has the opposite impact. Consider the Ben Franklin Effect. When someone else does a favor for you, it creates a deeper relationship between you, one where they now see you as more than just a vendor. 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.

The result of this USP development process?

“Thoughtform designs strategies and experiences to create change that lasts.”

It reflects who we are—and who our clients say we are.

Does your USP capture what makes your company different as clearly and powerfully as it could? Drop us a line, and we’ll help you develop a USP that resonates deeply with your customers.