“Promise, great promise, it is the soul of an advertisement.” But how do you make a big promise in your advertising that is powerful enough to convince the consumer to buy your product over competing brands?
One way is to develop a compelling unique selling proposition or USP.
What is a USP? Is it a term that describes the main advantage of your product over the competition? The idea is this: if your product is not different from or better than other products of the same type, there is no reason for consumers to choose your product over someone else’s. Therefore, to be promoted effectively, your product must have a Unique Selling Proposition – an important benefit that other products in your category do not offer.
There are three requirements for a USP.
1. Every ad must make a proposition to the consumer. Each one should say: “Buy this product and you will get this specific benefit.”
Your headline should contain a benefit, a promise to the reader.
2. The proposal must be one that the competition cannot or does not offer. This is where the uniqueness in Unique Selling Proposition comes into play. It is not enough to simply offer a benefit. You must also differentiate your product from other similar products.
3. The proposal must be so strong that it can move millions en masse, that is, attract new customers to your product. The differentiation cannot be trivial. It must be a very important difference for the reader.
Why are so many ads failing?
One reason is that the marketer has not formulated a strong USP for their product and built their advertising on it. Formulating a USP is not difficult, but it does require some thought and many people do not like to think. But when you start creating direct mail and advertising without first thinking about what your USP is, your marketing is weak because there is nothing compelling the reader to respond. It looks and sounds like everyone else, and what it says is not important to the reader.
In general packaged goods advertising, marketers achieve differentiation by building a strong brand at a cost of millions or even billions of dollars.
Most companies are too small, and have too strong a need to generate an immediate positive return on investment (ROI) from their marketing, to engage in this type of costly brand building. So we use other means to achieve 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 doesn’t.
The common mistake here is to build the USP around a feature that, while different, is not important to the prospect and therefore unlikely to lead them to try your product or service.
The easiest situation in which to create a strong USP is when your product has a unique feature, lacking in competitors, that provides great benefit. This must be a benefit that the customer really cares about. Not one that, even if it is a difference, is trivial.
But what if such an ownership advantage does not exist? What if your product is basically the same as the competition’s, with no special features? Here is the answer, uniqueness can come from a strong brand, other products can also have this feature, 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 its USP, what could the competition do? Post an ad that said, “We also melt in your mouth, not in your hand!”?
Four Ways to Advertise Seemingly Similar Products
1. Highlight a little-publicized or little-known benefit. Study your list of product features and benefits. Then look at the competition’s ads. Is there an important benefit that they have missed, one that you can accept as the unique selling proposition that sets your product apart from all the others?
A copywriter once visited a brewery hoping to learn something that would differentiate the brewery’s beer from other beers. He was fascinated to discover that beer bottles, like milk containers, are washed with live steam to kill germs. Although all brands of beer are purified in this way, no other manufacturer has emphasized this fact. So the editor wrote about a beer so pure that the bottles are washed with live steam, and the Unique Selling Proposition for the beer was born.
2. Dramatize a known benefit convincingly.
Radio Shack once ran a commercial showing two people using walkie-talkies, with each person standing on a different side of the Grand Canyon. Although most walkie-talkies work effectively at this distance, Radio Shack’s commercial was intended to draw attention to their product by demonstrating the range of the walkie-talkie in a unique and spectacular way.
3. Dramatize the name of the product or package.
Remember “Pez,” the candy that came in plastic dispensers made to look like Mickey Mouse, Pluto, and other cartoon characters? Pez was an ordinary candy, but the package made it special.
4. Build long-term brand personalities.
Another tactic used by manufacturers of major national brands is creating advertising that gives their brand “personality”.
Thousands of Marlboro-man commercials once made Marlboro a “macho” cigarette.
The old Don Meredith ads instilled in the consumer’s mind that Lipton tea is “energetic” and “elegant tasting.”
If you have millions to spend, you can use advertising to give your product a unique “personality” in the mind of the consumer. But even if your advertising budget is more modest, you can still use the features and benefits to create a unique selling proposition that sets your product apart from the rest.