The Unique Selling Proposition was proposed as a theory to explain a pattern among successful advertising campaigns of the early 1940's. It states that such campaigns made unique propositions to the customer and that this convinced them to switch brand.

In the marketing world, the unique selling proposition is usually referred to as the USP, although currently USP is also used to refer to less well defined concepts. For example, in computer industry the USP's are usually defined as those bullet point items listed on the back of the box. Traditionally, marketing has been a term applied to the craft of linking the producers (or potential producers) of a product or service with customers, both existing and potential. ...

Origin

In the early 1940's, Ted Bates & Company carried out extensive market research on successful advertising campaigns. In particular they identified two desirable attributes: the penetration and the usage pull.

The penetration is a measure of how many people can recall a given advertising campaign. The usage pull is the difference between people who buy the product in the penetrated and un-penetrated groups. For example, if 50% of people can remember a campaign then the penetration is 50%. If 10% of the un-penetrated group buy the product, and 20% of penetrated group buy the product, then the usage pull is 10%.

The pattern they found among campaigns that produced a high usage pull was the basis for the theory of the USP.

Definition

In Reality in Advertising, Rosser Reeves (Chairman of the Board at Ted Bates & Company) laments that USP are the three most misused letters in advertising. He goes on to give the precise definition as it was understood at his company:

1. Each advertisement must make a proposition to the customer: "buy this product, and you will get this specific benefit."

2. The proposition itself must be unique.

3. The proposition must be strong enough to pull new customers to the product.

Examples

Some good current examples of products with a clear USP are:

• Oil of Olay: you get younger looking skin
• Head and Shoulder's: you get rid of dandruff
• Red Bull: you get stimulation of body and mind
• Ronseal: you get what it says on the tin

References

• Reeves, Rosser (1961) Reality in Advertising, pp. 46-49. New York: Alfred A. Knopf