The Unique Selling Proposition: How to craft a USP for your client's product

The Unique Selling Proposition should be in the toolbox of every brand journalist.

Also known as the USP, the Unique Selling Proposition was the brainchild of advertising copywriter Rosser Reeves, one of the original Mad Men of the 1950s and ‘60s. He and his partner Ted Bates are among the models used to create the show’s lead character, Don Draper.

Reeves created the USP in the late 1940s to bring social science to “hard sell” advertising. He applied it to create some of the most effective print, radio and TV advertising of his day:

• M&Ms melt in your mouth, not in your hand.
• Only Anacin has four leading headache remedies.
• Wonder Bread helps build strong bodies in eight ways.
• Certs breath mints with a magic drop of retsyn.
• Colgate cleans your breath while it cleans your teeth.
• Only Viceroy gives you 20,000 filter traps in every filter.

Somehow, Reeves has fallen into obscurity while a handful of his peers remain well known: David Ogilvy, Bill Bernbach, Mary Wells, George Lois and Leo Burnett. Common wisdom in marketing and advertising says Reeves’s “hard sell” approach gave way to the Creative Revolution that overtook advertising in the late 1960s.

And yet the Unique Selling Proposition is as robust today as it was 60 years ago:

• Geico: “15 minutes could save you 15% or more on car insurance.”
• Apple iPod: “A thousand songs in your pocket.”
• Direct TV Genie: “Enjoy HD DVR Service in every room with just one HR DVR.”
• Southwest Airlines: “Bags fly free.”
• Axe shower gel: “Nothing beats an astronaut.”

You’ve may have read about the USP in books on copywriting, advertising and marketing. Unfortunately, the term has become as casually garbled in current use as “meme” and “nimrod.” Even Reeves called it “perhaps the most misused series of letters in advertising.”

Fortunately, Reeves laid out the rules of the USP in his 1961 book, “Reality in Advertising,” which is now sadly out of print. Here is how he described the USP.

“USP is a precise term and it deserves a precise definition:

1. “Each advertisement must make a proposition to the customer. … ‘Buy this product and you will get this specific benefit.’"
2. “The proposition must be one the competition cannot, or does not, offer. It must be unique – either a uniqueness of the brand or a claim not otherwise made in that particular field of advertising.
3. “The proposition must be so strong that it can … pull over new customers to your product.”

In other words: A USP is a unique and clear proposition that will grab attention and sell a product or service to a customer.

So, how does the Unique Selling Proposition work for the brand journalist?

First, we have to recognize that brand journalism is a form of advertising. If your only goal with your brand journalism is to attract attention, or spread awareness, or entertain an audience … then you are short-changing your clients. The goal is always to either sell the product outright, or (more likely) cause the prospect to take a specific action toward buying the product.

Second, we should also realize that the USP has a second cousin in journalism: the story angle. The angle is the approach to the story that makes it most interesting to the specific audience we are attempting to attract. It “sells” the story to the editor as well as to the reader or viewer.

The angle tells us what to put into the story and what to leave out. It tells us how to write the headline. It tells us how structure the story.

The USP serves the same function. Once we establish the Unique Selling Proposition, we have a north star to guide our research, our story structure, our headline, our selection of keywords, and our copywriting.