Dear Direct Response Letter Subscriber:
In 1961, Rosser Reeves published his classic book Reality in
Advertising in which he introduced the notion of the Unique
Selling Proposition, or USP.
Today the book is out of print and difficult to get. As a
result, most marketers don't know the original definition of a
USP. Their lack of knowledge often produces USPs that are weak
and ineffective.
According to Reeves, there are three requirements for a winning
USP:
1--Each advertisement must make a proposition to the consumer.
Each must say, "Buy this product, and you will get this specific
benefit."
Your headline must contain a benefit - a promise to the reader.
2--The proposition must be one that the competition either
cannot, or does not, offer.
Here's where the "unique" in Unique Selling Proposition comes
in. It is not enough merely to offer a benefit. You must also
differentiate your product.
3. The proposition must be so strong that it can move the
masses, i.e., pull over new customers to your product.
The differentiation cannot be trivial. It must be a difference
that is very important to the consumer.
Why do so many advertisements fail? One reason is that the
marketer has not formulated a strong USP for his product and
built his advertising upon it.
When you start creating your promotions without first thinking
about what your USP is, your marketing is weak because there is
nothing in it to compel the reader to respond.
It looks and sounds like everyone else, and what it says isn't
important to the reader.
In brand advertising for packaged goods, marketers achieve
differentiation by building a strong brand at a cost of millions
or even billions of dollars.
Coca Cola has an advantage because of its brand. If you want a
cola, you can get it from a dozen soda makers. But if you want a
Coke, you can only get it from Coca Cola.
Most Internet marketers are too small, and have too strong a
need to generate an immediate positive ROI from their marketing,
to engage in this kind of expensive brand building.
So we use other means to achieve the differentiation in our USP.
One popular method is to differentiate your product or service
from the competition based on a feature that your product or
service has and they don't.
But what if such a proprietary advantage does not exist? What if
your product is basically the same as the competition, with no
special features?
Reeves had the answer here too. He said the uniqueness can stem
from "a claim not otherwise made in that particular form of
advertising" - that is, other products may have this feature
too, but advertisers haven't told consumers about it.
An example from packaged goods advertising: "M&Ms melt in your
mouth, not in your hand."
Once M&M established this claim as their USP, what could the
competition do? Run an ad that said, "We also melt in your
mouth, not in your hand!"?
In his book Scientific Advertising, Claude Hopkins gives an
example of a USP that has become a classic story.
The short version: An ad man walking through his beer client's
brewery was fascinated by a machine that blasted steam into beer
bottles to sanitize them.
"Don't use that in advertising," the brewer told the ad man. "It
is nothing unique; every brewer does the same."
"Maybe," the ad man replied, "but I've never heard of it before,
and neither has any of the beer-drinking public."
He then created a successful ad campaign for a beer advertised
as so pure that "the bottles are washed in live steam."
Sincerely,
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