The myth of USP

Filed Under Communications

SP (Unique Selling Point or Unique Sales Proposition) is a useful concept, but is a poor description of a brand – and, inappropriately applied, fails to deliver what many brand owners want it to achieve. That’s because it can encourage narrow thinking about what a brand is, and how best to promote it.A lot of original brand thinking was done by ad agencies and I would argue that USP is a construct of the advertising mindset. Advertising requires a process of reducto ad absurdum, because it requires simplicity and single-mindedness of thought to get its message across in the limited time or space available.

But brands aren’t simple. They are complex and our reasons for inter-acting with them are often multifarious. The example I use in the UK is John Lewis the retailer. We don’t just use it because of – or only associate the brand with – ‘never knowingly undersold’. It’s also because of the range and quality of goods, the service, the ambiance to name but a few.

In other words brands are about a sum of knowledge - all the little things that we know and deem important to us. And it is all the touchpoints that confirm or force us to confront that knowledge.

The model I used to use was ‘brands as diamonds’. The top face might be the one we notice (the USP) but what makes it shine is all the other facets and how well polished they are.

Have you ever looked at the underside of an Innocent Smoothie bottle? To go so far as writing little messages there (I particularly liked”If you are reading this you must be really bored”) without ever talking about them in your marketing shows a brand that really understands itself and its consumers.

More recently I have been intrigued by the idea of brands as Velcro – lots of little hooks that people attach on to. A colleague - James Gordon-Macintosh - introduced me to this and has written about it here>.

I suspect that the truth lies somewhere in between - brands aren’t just about lots of little hooks - but they aren’t just about the ‘one big thing’ either.

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Go compare - the power of shouting

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There was a time when I thought that ‘comparethemeerkat’ was a superb piece of advertising.  (Let’s ignore the fact that the meerkat campaign has lost its way - they are struggling to work out how to take it forward).  When it arrived it made comparison sites mainstream.  It was so unusual that it was hard to see how anyone could top it.

Then along came ‘Go compare’.  Now I’m not saying by any means that it’s a great piece of advertising from an aesthetic point of view.  But it’s hard to argue against the sheer compelling intrusiveness of the fat bloke singing.  A really bad (good?) jingle, repeated time and again and it has entered our consciousness.  The same with ‘we buy any car’. Naff jingle, but at least you remember it.

Luckily for comparethemarket the effect has probably been to grow the market and usage of such sites.

But the lesson for marketers is clear - for all the sophistication of the multi-media world in which we live, a good bit of shouting doesn’t half work

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