1. Many people feel that USP is a must for success of a new product. Do you agree ?
2. Can you think of products who have succeeded with and without USP ?
3. Do you think that the concept of USP is dead or irrelevant ?
Prof Rajagopalan says......
In defense of ‘multi-minded’ communication strategy
In my forty years of marketing I was never hot on USP. After all my sessions in marketing many students asked me “Do you mean to say USP is dead?” I replied back to them “It is not that USP is dead, but it never really existed”. Did USP really exist? Or was it one more of those ‘creative creations’ of our advertising minds? Let’s take a closer look.It has been reinforced in many sessions on the Positioning theory and the USP theory that there is a single point in the brain meant for a particular benefit and whichever brand occupies it first, will stand to gain forever. This assumption was based on neurological findings dating back to 1940’s. But the recent theories of neurology do not support this assumption. Any memory is not a single point in the brain but is a series of ‘connections’ between millions of neurons. So the memory of a brand is a series of neural connections that connect specific neural connections about the brand’s benefit, name, colour, price, etc. And as we get more relevant new information about any thing, newer connections get attached to the existing connections. So if the consumer had a bad experience about the product, the neural connections pertaining to this information gets connected to the existing neural connections of the brand. The next time the consumer decides to buy this brand, along with the neural connections of the benefit, name, price etc the neural connections pertaining to the previous bad experience too gets activated. So memory is not a single point in the brain but an ever-increasing system of ‘connections’. No wonder that while buying many a product the consumer takes into consideration several parameters. Take the buying process of a car. No consumer chooses a car based on a single parameter. He evaluates different brands of car based on various parameters. So it is not the advantage in a single parameter that matter but a collective advantage across most of the important parameters that matter. In this scenario attributing the buying of the product to a single proposition is like attributing the strength of a rope to a strand in the rope. Is the scenario different for a low involvement category like an FMCG category? One of the prominent personal care categories had been dominated by one particular brand for decades. But things suddenly changed with the launch of a new brand from the competition. This new entrant has been positioned on a distinct single-minded platform. Ever since the launch, the new brand has been doing very well in the market place at the expense of the market leader. So every one in the marketing and advertising team of this brand believed that the single mindedly focused USP was the reason behind the success of the brand. But one day, one of the junior members in the team found a startling piece of information from the reels of tracking data on the brand. In a comparison between the new brand and the market leader, the new brand had always been a laggard on the so-called USP parameter. Then how did this brand continued to do so well in the market place for years and that too at the cost of the market leader brand? I assume that besides this USP, the consumer had information about some of the other parameters on which this brand was superior to the market leader and it is the combination of these factors that influenced the consumer to buy this brand. Thanks to the effect of the USP theory, the ‘single minded’ communication of many brands communicate information only about a single brand parameter to the consumer. The consumer is forced to get information about other parameters that are important for the buying decision from sources other than those ‘managed’ by the marketer. But a marketer who is aware of this ‘wide’ info search of the consumer will be able to spread his communication net far wider to influence all the points that disseminate information to the consumer. If the consumer buying decision is not based on a single parameter and is based on multiple parameters, the attempt of any marketer should be to first identify all the important parameters that are important in the buying decision. Then the advertising agency needs to identify the communication vehicles to communicate each of these parameters. So while the product details will be communicated through the newspaper ads and the Internet, the expert opinions from reliable third parties will be communicated through newspaper and magazine articles. The emotional benefit will be communicated through the television. The reputation of the manufacturer will be communicated through ‘word of mouth’. The discounts will be communicated through the dealer. The consumer might get a first hand feel of the product through the dealer or ‘demonstration events’. I believe that a move away from the USP theory will force the advertising agencies evolve into communication specialists. This is an evolutionary step that was long over due.
