And do you need one?

Many marketers talk about the Unique Selling Proposition, the USP.

If you’re wondering if they’re useful, you are not alone, or unique, even. Most clients bring it up, so we thought we’d examine whether there is a ‘point’ to them.

Is a usp a silver bullet

Depending on your world view, you may or may not agree with this article.

USP description

The USP was conceived as a way to help people, consumers, to make up their minds by having advertising that articulates a specific benefit of the product.

USP based advertising is definitely more to do with sales than with any previous form of advertising. And because our world view is that (web) marketing is just sales, but to a wider audience, we applaud the sentiment!

What if we don’t feel unique

Most clients have trouble with the USP concept, they feel ‘dishonest’ by claiming they are unique (hold onto that thought). For those who struggle, a USP doesn’t have to be unique to your product, just unique to your marketing, with no other local competitor claiming it.

This construct pre-supposes that people will be persuaded by the USP’s specific benefit, and it will make up their minds for them. Will it work?

What’s the proposition?

Here’s what we discovered about the humble, old fashioned USP and it’s influence on prospect decision making.

The concept of the USP was originally from the world of advertising in the 1950’s, and its key protagonist was Rosser Reeves who is the basis of one current hero of ours – Don Draper of the tv show MadMen uses his accomplishments, it says here in Wikipedia.

The thinking behind USP’s is that people will weigh every aspect of a product or solution, and will make a perfectly balanced judgement based on ‘the truth’. Of course, your version of the truth will include that thing that ‘only you do’, the thing, the slogan, that makes it overwhelmingly likely that people will make the right choice.

Effectively, this is where the idea of the slogan came from.

The USP and the time constraint

If you read the article in Wikipedia, and I recommend you do, there is a key statement

His (Rosser Reeves) greatest contributions were to express more clearly than anyone else the philosophy of a claim and to show how the philosophy could be applied to commercials that involve severe time constraints.

The USP is key when you have time contraints, and for us, that means it is specific to the advertising format.

It doesn’t apply to marketing, or to face to face selling and to a degree it doesn’t apply to the web – you wouldn’t use a USP in isolation.

A website is not advertising. People only turn up if they are looking for something, most often via a search engine, and these people are willing to give you more time, they’re not there to ignore you.

So USPs don’t work as well when time isn’t limited, but we’d suggest the home page is the one place where a slogan fits, and unique is good.

Do USP’s help people make buying decisions?

We don’t think so.

There is a new science that examines decision making, its called ‘behavioural economics’, and is more interesting than it sounds. We picked this up from discussions on SEOMoz, (hat tip) about nudges and a comment therein about Dan Ariely.

Behaviour is something we will come back to again and again in the future.

1. It is now accepted, by some people, that ‘facts’ are completely ignored if they don’t match what you already believe in, and if you don’t know what you believe in, then facts won’t necessarily help. This is supported by Congitive Behavioural Therapy, if you’re interested.

2. People will not believe you when you tell them your USP anyway. If you disagree, then you’ll understand the point.

3. But for a real ‘insight’ on decision making, look at the first video on this linked page from Dan Ariely, on making decisions. It is 17 minutes of joyous confusion.

Incredibly, this calls into question the ability for us to make balanced, lucid decisions. Of course, this doesn’t apply to the likes of you and me. It’s everyone else that has the trouble.

We firmly believe that the more complex the solution, the more money is involved, the more likely that USP’s won’t work. Simply, it is less likely that a single factor will convince a large proportion of the audience.

The final nail in the USP coffin

Would seem to be in the same article

In the 1960s Reeves’ techniques began to fail. Consumers became more savvy and learnt to tune out uninteresting commercials

This sort of advertising started to fail once consumers realised marketers were manipulating them. It went on to be replaced by emotional branding.

The key is that time on the web is not limited, and this is why long copy works, once again. Emotional branding won’t work on the web (on it’s own) for much the same reason. A combination would cover all the bases.

The product is the marketing

My friend Seth Godin promotes that the product is the marketing – he’s right. This is a long quote, but exceptional.

To work, advertising has to be honest. He insists the product being sold actually be superior, and argues that no amount of advertising could move inferior goods. He also disagrees that advertising was able to create demand where it did not exist. (edit: Sell what people are looking for)

Successful advertising for a flawed product will only increase the number of people who try the product and become dissatisfied with it.

If advertising is effective enough and a product flawed enough, the advertising will accelerate the destruction of the brand.

Similarly, it is a waste of money to claim uniqueness that doesn’t exist (you can let go of that thought now), because consumers will soon find out, and they won’t come back to the brand. This is important because historically fortunes are made from repeat business (edit: emphasis mine). Money would be better spent building some kind of meaningful advantage into a product before launching a costly advertising campaign to promote it.

The thing is, Seth Godin didn’t say the above originally, Rosser Reeves did in the 1960’s. Most people forgot, or didn’t learn it in the first place, that is until the marketing world shattered into little pieces and required that the product to be good again. Products get found out quicker with social media (Word Of Mouth on Speed).

I queued a long time to get this photo

(See, I do know him)