A USP differentiates your product from all others on the market. It is memorable and sticks in the consumer’s mind. It lights a new idea or brings out an old idea that was never brought forward before. It prevents your product from getting lost in the fog of blandness. The classics are the place to start looking for good ones…
If you are new to USPs, a good way to get brought up to speed quickly is by reviewing examples of effective USPs. In this article I want to present a few examples cited by Rosser Reeves in his book about the USP, Reality in Advertising. I think these will help shed light on the matter.
A classic example is the Schlitz beer campaign, written by Claude Hopkins, Advertising Extraordinaire. He took a tour of the brew factory in order to gain an understanding of the product and the process of turning hops and barley into delicious beer. When he saw that the beer bottles were washed with steam, he was amazed. His guide told him that it was nothing special — all beer companies wash their bottles with live steam.
A BREAKTHROUGH USING A SECRET TO NO ONE…EXCEPT THE CUSTOMERS
Hopkins kindly told the guide that it wasn’t what they all did, but what they advertised they did. He wrote an ad using the line “Our bottles are washed with live steam!”
Imagine — beer so good that its bottles were sterilized by steam before the beer was injected so as to risk not contaminating the flavor. Super clean bottles! That ad helped blow sales through the roof.
Lucky Strike, a cigarette company, played much the same angle when it advertised “It’s toasted!” Of course, all cigarette tobacco was. But none of their competitors advertised it. And what a delicious image it painted — toasted tobacco! Cigarettes that reminded you of all the good and delicious flavors and aromas of any number of toasted foods. What could their competitors do? Nothing, short of release ads that said “Our is toasted, too!” They’d simply be running advertisements for Lucky Strike.
The series opener of the hit show Mad Men featured this story in a fictionalized account. The main star was hard at work coming up with a great campaign for his client, Lucky Strike. After interviewing several people and doodling several ideas, he came up with the idea of “It’s toasted” and presented it to the company executives. I don’t know how the real meeting went, but I’m sure it was similar to the account created by the show.
BRUSHING UP ON TOOTHPASTE
An old toothpaste advertisement revealed that using their product “Gets rid of film on teeth!” This is another example cut from the same mold as these others. Of course their toothpaste removes tooth film does because that is the purpose of toothpaste! But no one up to that point had thought to articulate the idea specifically.
They made a critical mistake common to advertisers: they thought that they don’t need to advertise the basic purposes that they assumed people already know. If you can rid yourself of this crippling philosophy then you’ll really do yourself some favors.
Listerine was the first company to come right out and say it: “Stops halitosis!”
Lifebuoy Soap, which is no longer produced in the United States (though you can still catch a glimpse of in the Christmastime TV favorite “A Christmas Story”), spoke with honesty when it said “Stops B.O.!” All soap does, and a strong argument can be made that stopping B.O. is soap’s Number One Benefit.
Lifebuoy made it. And they profited from it.