USP: Unique Selling Proposition

[bitheerani93]

The term "unique selling proposition" was introduced by the famous ideologist of rationalistic advertising Rosser Reeves. He contrasted the strategy he proposed, first of all, with the so-called "showcase" advertising, in which behind the abundance of beautiful laudatory phrases about the product there is nothing concrete, nothing that could distinguish the brand from a number of similar ones in consumer terms.

Explaining his term, R. Reeves pointed out that a successful advertising strategy, which he called a “unique selling point” (USP), must satisfy three basic conditions:

1. Each advertisement must contain a specific offer to the consumer: buy this particular product and get this particular benefit.

2. The offer must be something that the competitor either cannot offer or simply does not offer. It must be unique. Its uniqueness must be malaysia whatsapp data either to the uniqueness of the product or to a statement that has not yet been made in this area of ​​advertising.

3. The offer must be strong enough to attract new consumers to consumption.

Let's consider these conditions. The first of them is well known to advertisers - it is repeated in many modern works on advertising and in another version sounds like this: advertising should inform the consumer about the benefit (material or psychological), that is, it should be built on the principle of empathy.

The second condition is the essence of the advertising strategy proposed by R. Reeves. In his opinion, to ensure the success of an advertising campaign, an advertiser must find and formulate a statement about a product that competitors cannot repeat or have not yet thought of putting forward, although they could. Therefore, in the perception of consumers, this statement becomes unique. R. Reeves emphasized that the USP is not necessarily associated with the unique consumer characteristics of the product. With the current level of standardization of production, products that truly have unique properties do not appear on the market often.

What's What: True and False Unique Selling Propositions

Let's call advertising claims based on a real characteristic of a product that distinguishes it from all (or many) other products within the product category, <true> USPs, and all other claims of uniqueness - <false> USPs.

An example of a true USP is the advertisement for a Samsung TV with a bioceramic coating, the properties of which are not duplicated by competitors. This feature of the product is reinforced by the name "BioTV" and the advertising slogan: "The living is drawn to BIO!" (Here we leave aside the question of whether this bioceramic coating promises real benefits. It is only important that this is apparently a unique property).

Much more often, however, the main consumer characteristics of the product are not unique on the market. But even in this case, advertisers can create a true USP. Of course, we are not talking about outright false advertising: we mean such advertising techniques when a message about the uniqueness of a product is constructed using purely linguistic means, although its consumer properties are not unique. In some cases, true USPs are based on skillful emphasis on a real characteristic that distinguishes the product not from all, but from most other products in the same product category. For example;.