What is a USP and should you use them in your brand strategies

USPs (Unique Selling Propositions) are an outdated concept for modern brand strategy. They originated in the 1940s to emphasize functional product benefits in advertising. While this made sense when brands had unique functional differences, today's market is crowded, and most functional differentiators are easily copied.

Today, brands need to focus more on emotional connections and bigger promises beyond mere functionality. While the concept of differentiation is still crucial - and you need to identify a brand's relative strengths vs. competition - using the term "USP" may date your work, be too difficult to articulate and misses the broader emotional narrative essential for modern brand building.

Read on for what a unique selling proposition is, USP examples, and advice from some of the world's most successful business leaders on why this is not enough to build a strong brand today.

What USPs mean and why they are outdated 

So you've got to understand where this term has come from. And the main reason I'd suggest you just don't go anywhere near it is it will date you. It will make your work, be perceived as perhaps not being relevant to the times, because the phrase USP was created in the 1940s by Rosser Reeves at Ted Bates advertising agency.

It was done with the best intentions at the time. The idea was that in every advertising campaign you needed to recognise that people were going to buy the product for a specific benefit. So Rosser Reeves was pushing the idea that we need to talk about a benefit in advertising to ensure our customers understand why they should choose us. And the concept of talking about a benefit that helps people understand why they should choose us over others is still what we talk about. But the phrase has become associated with a focus only on rational, functional product benefits.

Because it was coined in the 1940s when there weren't 30,000 different brands on a supermarket shelf, brands could get away with talking about a functional differentiator, a unique thing that they could sell about themselves, that would make a promise to a customer. Things like we make clothes whiter - that was a Persil USP from a long time ago -  or head and shoulders from the 1960s talking about being the only brand that gets rid of dandruff. These are very functional product benefits.

But the problem today is that most brands can't build a brand upon a functional differentiator.  Most companies and most products are very similar, and there isn't enough of a perceived difference between the functional, rational attributes and benefits of most brands enough to help a customer understand why they should choose one over another.

So that's partly why brands started moving into more emotional areas.  Because functional stuff was easily copied, and it wasn't enough anymore to say we make clothes whiter. We know that Persil makes clothes whiter. We know that Ariel will make clothes whiter. We know that Tide makes clothes whiter. We know that all the brands that are on the supermarket shelf make our clothes clean, so they have to stand out in a different way. It's why brands like Pampers moved away from talking only about dryness and dry nappies/diapers to becoming a partner in the mother baby relationship -  because it wasn't enough anymore to talk about that product benefit underneath. Yes - they were relatively better at it, but Huggies also kept babies dry.

Because USPs are generally associated with unique functional differentiators - that's really the most commonly understood definition of a unique selling proposition - that's why I'm suggesting you don't use them.  The world has moved on from that initial thinking of USPs as the building block of brands.

Now you'll still see the phrase used. You'll still read it. People still write about them. Brands sometimes still use the phrase. Not the world's best brands - I've hardly seen any of them talk about USPs - but you will see other organisations use it. The intention behind it is still helpful. We're still looking for differentiation - but rarely is this difference rooted in something truly unique.

Even the world's most innovative brands that do have something unique about their product's form or function steer away from it.

Take these two multi-billion dollar examples  - Salesforce -  a B2B (business to business) brand and Liquid Death- a B2C brand (business to consumer). Both new entrants in very established categories that grew to billion dollar+ brands incredibly quickly.

From the beginning Salesforce set out to build a very different company and brand. They had a new technology model (cloud computing), new sales model (subscription based) and new philanthropic model (integrated into the corporation). Their entry into the market upended software businesses and tech models as we knew it. But from the start, Salesforce's CEO Marc Benioff knew the brand needed to be about much more than this. Here's him talking about the Salesforce brand in his book 'Behind the Cloud'.

"A brand is a company’s most important asset. A company can’t ‘own’ its facts. If the company’s facts (speed, price quality) are superior to the competition, any good competitor will duplicate them, or worse, improve upon them, as soon as possible. What a company can own, however, is a personality… It goes beyond logic. It’s an emotional attachment, and that’s an asset that cannot be stolen by any competitor."

In the B2C world, Liquid Death have difference on so many dimensions: name and a very distinctive look and feel; emotive clarity, particularly through the use of humour; a leading responsibility platform; product size, material (a 700ml can of healthy beverages versus water in transparent plastic bottles. and sugar-filled drinks in cans). They’ve challenged the status quo at every level of the brand building process. But here's a very similar perspective from Mike Cessario, Founder of Liquid Death, as told to Jon Evans in this Uncensored CMO episode.

"If your brand is functional benefits you don’t have a brand because you can’t own functional benefits. I can’t own aluminium cans. So the minute Coke or someone else makes a can of water I spent all my marketing dollars to tell people why their product is great." 

The most functionally different brand I've ever worked on is one of the brands I use as an example in Brand Strategy Academy - a brand called ETO. ETO is a beautifully designed wine preservation device and decanter that performs way better than any other wine preservation device out there. Nothing comes close at their price point for preserving wine for that length of time (up to two weeks). And yet, still, that wasn't enough for them.

We worked together to also define the emotional benefit of ETO - becuase the real value isn't just to preserve wine. The benefit of that is to give you wine on your time.  You can choose when you drink wine, how much to drink, the quality level of the bottle you open, etc. because you know it's not going to spoil. And that gives you that peace of mind and freedome to indulge when you want to, but not create any waste. To have wine on your terms, in your time. The product is still functionally superior and different to anything else out there but they are building a stronger brand by also defining why that matters to wine lovers the world over.

Like ETO, some brands do launch with something unique in the market. Remember M&Ms talking about how they melt in your mouth and not in your hands? And Apple's 1000 songs in your pocket? But these are rare (and old!), and as Mike Cessario and Marc Benioff point out, these functional differences are fleeting.  Modern brand strategy has to be built on much more than this.

So that's the story around USPS, and it's why it's not part of the brand strategy deliverable in Brand Strategy Academy. In our framework we root our answers to the brand strategy questions in the relative strengths of the product, but ladder up to a much bigger and more emotional benefit too.  

Brand Strategy Academy is an online course for people wanting to be able to sell and do brand strategy with clarity and confidence.  Grab your spot here.