Jay Miletsky

Most branding pros will attest to the importance of the USP, but before we just accept it as a necessity to the brand, let’s be clear about the what it means to be “unique” and determine how unique a quality has to be before it really makes a difference to the consumer.

To my knowledge (and some scientist somewhere could possibly prove me wrong), no two things can be 100-percent identical. Geography alone would make each of them unique, in that two entities can’t occupy the same exact space at the same exact time. Even if you clone a dog, with the original and the copy completely the same from a genetic standpoint, the dogs would still be unique based on the fact that at any given time, they would each standing in different places.

The same is true for companies. Take two competing comic-book stores in neighboring towns, for example. As chance has it, both are run by nice guys who are very passionate about comic books, both have exactly the same inventory of comic books, both present their comic books in pretty much the same way, and both charge the exact same price for their books. For all intents and purposes, both stores are the same. Their only real difference is geography, so it stands to reason that consumers will simply shop at whichever store is closer to them. Proximity to the consumer, in this case, makes each store unique enough.

But let’s place those stores across the street from each other. Now, even geography doesn’t make a difference. They’re competing for the same pool of customers. The natural tendency of each store owner would be to take some action – lower prices, offer a comic-book-delivery service, hold in-store comic-book-art workshops – that makes his or her store unique so that consumers will have a reason to choose his or her shop over the other.

So what happens when geography isn’t a factor? The same basic principle holds true. Take competing brands of soap. All manufacturers ship to the same supermarkets, so it doesn’t matter to the consumer where their offices, factories, or distribution centers are located. The competing products are on the shelf next to each other. If all these bars of soap were exactly the same, then the total market would simply be divided equally among them. But again, the natural tendency of competing companies is to try to stand out among their competition in order to draw in a larger audience, and to build a brand based on their unique qualities.

So the answer to the question “Does every brand have to have a unique selling proposition” is yes, they do. Without one, the company might survive, but not the brand. But what really matters is the relevancy of this unique quality. In the case of soap, if one company simply decides to carve an X into the center of each bar, it may make those bars unique, but not in a way that consumers will care about – so it won’t help build the brand. Instead, these manufacturers must instill unique qualities that are more relevant to the market – scent, size, price, shape, or something else along those lines.