In the world of business and marketing, understanding and highlighting your Unique Selling Point (USP) is crucial in getting you ahead of the pack. I’ve been looking at this aspect for my own business branding and new website (soon to be unveiled), and began to think about how individuals advertise their uniqueness when developing personal relationships with others, such as friendships and dating? How do we discover we have things in common with potential new friends? How do we sift through other people’s characteristics to match our own needs when dating, or do we just look at the photo? How much do we use our USP to draw the people we want towards us? 
In today’s world where communication has to be fast and instant, email, text, twitter etc have largely taken over from face-to-face communication, and often by the time we actually meet someone, we have already formed an opinion of them, including whether we like them or not. On the surface, thisis ridiculous that we can judge someone through a badly worded or blunt email or blurb on a website. This happens though, due to our emotional response to what they are saying or their photo. What is your gut feeling? Do you take a chance on meeting someone or developing a friendship or relationship if the ten or twenty seconds you have spent reading their communication has put you off? Generally the answer is no. We are living a larger and faster version of Britain’s Got Talent, in which we can parade a selection of potential friendships or partners on our iPad screens daily and can ditch twenty or thirty applicants in a couple of minutes, job done!
If this is resonating with you, what happens if you are on the other side of the iPad screen? What are you offering to stop someone else passing you over? A number of websites offer advice on how to set up your profile and outline your interests in such a way as to match you with others who could or should value the same things as you. The key thing is what makes you different to the others out there who are competing in the same market? What is your USP and how do you get it across to others?
