The USP is dead. Long live Repetitive Pleasures.

Traditionally, when products are marketed and advertised, there’s a Unique Selling Proposition or a Consumer Promise at the heart of everything. “How is our product better than and/or different to its competitors? What is the one thing we can say to consumers?”

Rosser Reeves of the Ted Bates agency introduced the terms in the 1940s. Both have proved remarkably resilient, probably because they encourage a discipline of single-mindedness. Nothing wrong with that.

Robin Wight took the USP to a new level in the 1980s when he coined the maxim ‘Interrogate the product until it confesses.’ His London agency WCRS prided itself on “hard-centred advertising… based on a substantial and compelling product truth… a solid and unequivocal reason to buy.”

These days, we see two problems with (1) a product-centric approach (2) that talks at rather than with the consumer and (3) tends to be one-dimensional, rational and simplistically beneficial.

Firstly, products are commoditised. Interrogating them is like trying to squeeze blood from a stone. Not a good way to spend the week.

Secondly, this is not how human beings work. We don’t interrogate ourselves to come up with a Consumer Promise before we go on a date. We don’t look for the USP in a partner. Or in a career, a neighbourhood or a religion. Or even in a TV series or blog.

The USP is not how we build meaningful relationships in our lives. Why should it works with brands? Especially when it’s a relationship we desire, not a one-way monologue, usually intermittent in nature, with someone half-dead in front of a TV.

So what’s the answer?

In 1927 E.M. Forster used the descriptor repetitive pleasures to capture the value of one-dimensional characters who interact with the more complex main characters in a drama or novel.*

“In their purest form, they are constructed round a single idea or quality… they are easily recognised by the reader’s emotional eye… they never need reintroducing, never run away… they are easily remembered by the reader afterwards. They remain in his mind as unalterable… not changed by circumstance, which gives them a comforting quality … nearly every one can be summed up in a single sentence, and yet there is this wonderful feeling of human depth.”

He could be talking about brands, couldn’t he?

Take E.M. Forster’s insight and apply it to your life in 2015. You and the people close to you are complex characters immersed in a drama which can be uncertain, uncomfortable and unfair, often challenging, yet wonderful and exhilarating. It’s reassuring – and probably very necessary – for your life to include moments which E.M. Forster would describe as “easily recognised, constant, with a comforting quality.” Many, many things in your life, you realise, could be called repetitive pleasures.

  • The smell of your first coffee of the day
  • Opening your front door after a long day at work
  • A cycle with the guys on a Saturday morning
  • The mid-week match
  • Your favourite soapie
  • Book club
  • Sunday evening takeaways
  • Supper with good friends
  • Full moons
  • The return of spring

You get the picture. Repetitive pleasures are a very important – and very wonderful – part of our lives. Things like the full moon and the return of spring are a profoundly, reassuringly repetitive. And small things like Sunday takeaways matter, not because they are momentous extravaganzas, but precisely because they the exact opposite: they are small, simple moments. They are lighthouses which help us navigate the swirling seas of our lives. It is their reassuring repetitiveness that we welcome into our lives.

Brands can be repetitive pleasures too. Indeed, many iconic brands already are.

At this point, you can probably see how some brands could also be described as repetitive pleasures. Consider Johnnie Walker.

In the 1990s, sales of Johnnie Walker whisky were declining. London ad agency BBH was appointed to develop “an enduring brand idea that could transcend borders and adapt to local as well as global business needs.” **

Yes, Johnnie Walker had blended whiskies for almost two centuries. Yes, they had won awards and supplied whisky to the royal household.

BBH was doing its homework, but it was onto something bigger. They understood that if they interrogated the drinker as well as the product, things got interesting. On one occasion a man having a whisky at the end of the day could be celebrating an achievement, a milestone, with friends. On another he could be quietly acknowledging to himself that he had made it through a truly difficult day. Either way, BBH understood that Johnnie Walker could affirm one of the great truths about life: that it requires perseverance.

Keep walking.

Now, it is simply not possible for an interrogation of a whisky to result in the USP, ‘Keep walking.’ That’s almost laughable. But when you take a step forward, put yourself in someone’s shoes and see the world from their perspective, it is entirely possible to ask, ‘What matters to this person? How does our product fit into their life?’

And it is entirely possible for the answer to be, ‘Perseverance matters.’

And it is entirely feasible for a brand based on that answer to be better than and different to any other brand. The repetitive pleasure therefore gets the manufacturer out of the commodity trap and opens up valuable possibilities for unfair competitive advantage.

This seemingly small shift in perspective is invaluable. But it does more too.

“This wonderful feeling of human depth.” 

Brands can affirm. They can inspire. They can reassure. They can enrich and nourish who we are.

This is how they become valuable to society. And it’s how they become valuable to their manufacturers. We respond by making them part of our lives. As the sales results alongside testify.

USPs can’t do this. But repetitive pleasures can.

 

 

* Forster, E. M. 1971. Aspects of the Novel. Penguin Books: 75

** http://www.creativebrief.com/agency/work/686/12