What is a Unique Selling Proposition?

A Unique Selling Proposition (USP) is your golden ticket.

It's what sets you apart in a crowded market. It speaks directly to your target client. Makes you the go-to choice. Makes consumers pull out their wallet and shell out the big bucks because you're something special. Magical, really.

The magic lies in specificity and resonance. Your USP should speak directly to your target market's pain points and desires.

It's not about you. It's about them.

What Makes a USP Good?

Let's face it. Most USP's are less than average. Okay. Yeah, they suck.

So what makes a unique selling proposition great? Or, amazing even?

A great USP has the following attributes:

• Clear: No jargon. Speak their language.
• Concise: Economy of words. The shorter, the stickier.
• Unique: If your competitors can say it, it's not your USP.
• Specific: "The best" is too vague. "America's #1" is better.
• Customer-Oriented: Solve a problem or satisfy a need.
• Credible: Can you prove it?
• Memorable: Make it catchy. Rhyme and rhythm help.

Besides these attributes, a great USP has to make you feel something - a connection, or a sense that your business is going to deliver on its promise.

I call these themes. And I've found 17 of them.

The 17 Unique Selling Proposition Themes

After analyzing 129 USP's from leading companies across 10 different industries, I found that great USP's touch at least 1 of 17 themes:

Great USP's truly connect on at least one of these 17 themes. 

Disney's "The Happiest Place on Earth" really tugs hard on emotional appeal.

FedEx's "When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight." is a stellar example of the outcome theme.

Both USP's are best in class utilizing a single theme, and I wouldn't change a thing about them.

But the best USP's touch on multiple themes at once.

For example, Rolex's "A Crown for every achievement." hits on three themes: 

• Emotional Connection
• Luxury / Status
• Lifestyle & Identity

In 5 words, Rolex was able to touch three different connections for their ideal client - a thing of beauty.

Distribution of USP Themes

Below, you will find a distribution of the USP themes utilized by the 129 companies studied.

You may notice that there are more than 129 themes represented in the chart below. This is because many of USP examples utilized multiple themes in their USP, connecting with their client in multiple ways.

The Emotional Connection, Lifestyle & Identity, and Simplicity themes are the most highly represented themes in the sample data, but as a caveat, it is a small sample size.

Still, it gives us some good indicators on top themes that should be considered when designing your own USP.

Cool. So now that you know the basics, let's get into the examples. Then, I'll show you exactly how to create your very own USP.

By nature, consumer tech software companies generally focus on simplifying the difficult, so we see a clear domination of the Simplicity theme in 46.6% of our tech company unique selling proposition examples.

After Simplicity, the next theme is determined by the goal the company is trying to solve:

• Headspace = Health & Wellness
• LinkedIn = Opportunity
• ServiceTitan = Expertise / Specialization

Mint & Paypal on the other hand do not focus on the goal, but more on their client's biggest fear and hurdle in using their software, security.

Tech Company USP examples:

The themes we see in Personal Care & Beauty USP examples are a bit more spread out.

Quality of ingredients is a dominant theme represented in 41.6% of our examples.

It is easy to see how Emotional Connection and Health & Wellness connect with consumers, but there are some other interesting themes we find:

• Johnson's Baby Shampoo = Outcome
• Dollar Shave Club = Affordability
• Khiel's = Heritage

Gillette's "The best a man can get." and L'oreal Paris' "Because you're worth it." USP's are beautiful examples of playing off the psyches of their respective audience.

Personal Care & Beauty Company USP examples:

Nearly 39% of our Food & Beverage USP examples include the use of the Emotional Connection theme.

Not surprising. Food is an emotional choice. 

My favorites in this category are the two Extreme Niche brand USP's: Death Wish Coffee's "The world's strongest coffee." and Imperfect Food's "Ugly produce. Delivered."

Death Wish Coffee has nailed their ideal client. Anyone looking for a the strongest coffee knows exactly who to choose.

Ugly Produce is just plain fun. They deliver perfectly good produce that doesn't meet grocery store standards in the looks department.

Still, we see a wide variation of themes food and beverage space:

• Domino's & M&M's = Outcome 
• Coca-Cola = Emotional Connection
• Chipotle & RXBar = Quality Ingredients

I can't help but mention Domino's "30 minute or less, or its free." campaign which catapulted the brand to success.

Food & Beverage Company USP examples:

In our Fashion & Sportswear USP examples, we not only move from just an Emotional Connection but to connecting with the consumer's Lifestyle and Identity. 58% of our fashion and sportswear unique selling propositions featured the Lifestyle / Identity theme.

I'm not surprised. There is a reason Nike sneakers can sell for more than $20k a pop. The brand is truly ingrained into the buyer's identity

A great example of utilizing a different theme is seen in TOMS Shoes. Their USP, "With every shoe you purchase, TOMS will help someone in need." utilized the Societal Impact theme to great effect. Clients loved the shoes and the feeling of helping those in need. 

Fashion & Sportswear Company USP examples:

Our Retail & E-Commerce USP examples are a bit different We have an even 16.6% split with the Affordability, Lifestyle & Identity, and Emotional Connection themes.

This variety is evidenced by the fact that retail and e-commerce can be very niche. Each niche has a different client it is trying to attract. 

• Warby Parker = Luxury + Affordability (an oxymoron that works)
• Zappos = Customer First (and famously I might add)
• Planet Fitness = Emotional Connection (but the exact opposite of what you might think when it comes to gyms)

These examples show many different ways to connect with clients leading to some truly great inspiration!

Retail & E-Commerce Company USP examples:

For our Consumer and Homegoods USP examples, we see three themes with 20% representation each: Category Leader, Lifestyle / Identity, and Emotional Connection.

Mr. Clean and Tide both go the Category Leader route and stand by their claim. Category Leader is one of the tougher themes to manage because you must be able to back it up. 

A few of the more interesting themes:

• GoPro = Opportunity
• Lego = Emotional Connection
• Dyson = Reliability & Performance

Consumer & Home Goods Company USP examples:

The Societal Impact theme was represented in 33.3% of our Industrial & Machinery Company USP examples.  At first I was surprised to see this, but it it is understandable given that these 3 are humongous transformational companies like 3M, Waste Management, and Evoqua.  

The Quality and Reliability / Performance Themes are present in Caterpillar, Trane, and John Deere which makes sense for industrial machinery.

Industrial & Machinery Company USP examples:

44.4% of our Entertainment & Media Company USP examples utilized the Emotional Connection Theme. Nintendo's "Experience the joy of play." is a great example of this theme.

I really enjoyed HBO's use of the Category Leader theme in their USP: "It's not TV, it's HBO."

One of my favorite Entertainment & Media Company USP's is Draft King's "Make it reign." The play on words positions them as the "King" of sports betting while also hitting on the opportunity of winning big. Make it rain!

Entertainment & Media Company USP examples:

Unsurprisingly, most automaker themes center around the Lifestyle / Identify theme. The vehicle you drive is insanely personal. Just ask a Jeep driver.

The Expertise theme is represented by Airbus & Rolls-Royce. Obviously, we expect our planes to be expertly engineered so our planes do not crash and the ultimate luxury car to be a perfect feat of engineering and design.

One of my favorite Automotive and Transport Company USP's is Harley Davidson's "American by Birth. Rebel by Choice." I guarantee you no other brand has connected so well with their audience as evidenced by 1000's of Harley Davidson tattoos sported by Harley riders.

Automotive & Transport Company USP examples:

Now that we understand USP themes and have seen 129 examples of great USP's, you are armed with the information to craft your very own Unique Selling Proposition.

I'll take you through my very own 5 step USP generating process.

The secret to creating a truly great unique selling proposition is in understanding your clients, and exactly why they should buy from you.

To help with this, ask yourself these questions:

1. Who is your ideal client? What do they need?
2. What about your business is unique?
3. What benefits do you provide your clients? Which of these stands out above others?
4. What do your competitors do better than you?
5. Anything you can improve on?

Thinking through these questions will help you understand what sets your business apart from others in the market.

Now, let's take your most unique benefit or benefits from the questions above and start thinking about your USP in terms of themes. Remember, there are a total of 17 USP themes that are commonly used by the top companies in the world.

Here they are again for ease of scrolling.

Rank your business in each theme in order.

For example, let's say you own an auto repair shop. Your top 4 themes may be:

1. Quality
2. Emotional Connection
3. Heritage
4. Outcome

Let's continue with the auto repair shop example. 

Let's say our shop has been open in our community for 50 years (Heritage Theme) We believe in top quality (Quality Theme) work while being completely honest (Emotional Connection Theme). We'll treat you and your vehicle like we would  our own Mother (Outcome Theme).

Now we have two options:

1. Narrow it down to a single theme and benefit, and create a short catchy USP.
2. Stack themes for greater impact.

The best USP's hit multiple themes at once. This can be extremely difficult to do.

When done correctly it is a beautiful thing.

For our auto repair shop, we'll try to stack our top 4 themes in our USP:

For our auto repair shop, we were able to stack 4 themes into one single USP.

Note that this USP is longer than our example USP's, but that's okay, especially for local service businesses because you do want to be more specific (like adding in the specific location you serve.

In fact, I would prefer to have a longer USP if it truly communicates your unique selling proposition and brand promise.

However, the larger your business grows, the more precise your USP should become, as long as it clearly communicates the brand promise and unique value.

Here we'll take our long USP and refine to its best and simplest form. This can be done now or over the course of years.

Let's take our auto repair shop example once again:

If Trust & Quality are our most compelling unique benefits over our competitors, and we only added "ensuring your family's safety" to hit on the Outcome theme, we could remove "ensuring your family's safety" to further refine our USP.

Our USP would now look like this:

This flows a bit better, and while we've removed the Outcome theme, the Quality theme already insinuates a good outcome. No harm here.

But, what if our little auto repair shop is growing? We're in more towns. Multi-state even! 

Location doesn't matter as much anymore as we can no longer be the center point of just want community or state. In this case we can take out the location.

Maybe we start to think. We don't just want to be a company. We want to be seen as experts.

We do have the best trained technicians.

So, we're going to change "company" to "automotive experts" to add in the Expertise theme.

Now, here is something cool. I want to make one more slight adjustment. By adding just one word, "delivering," we can add back the Outcome theme in a very fluid and cohesive way.

So, here is our final result.

With our latest revision, we're now hitting on 5 themes: Trust, Expertise, Outcome, Quality, and Heritage. Not too bad.

Similarly, your USP should go through a revision process both during creation and throughout the life of your company as it grows and transforms.