USPOV®s.
Not USPs.
Unique Selling Points
are all about the product - and are very rare.
Unique Selling Points Of View®
are all about the people who use them.
And aren’t so rare at all.
The trouble with Unique Selling Points is that memorable, tangible ones - concerning things that customers actually want - aren't easy to come up with.
In most industries, the fundamental problems have already been solved in similar ways. There are only so many ways to make a cup of coffee, deliver a package, or design a smartphone.
And inevitably, even if you do manage to devise something that ticks all those boxes, the reality is that if they’re that good they’ll get copied very quickly.
And then how do you differentiate your product from everyone else’s?
You’re back to square one.
“Creativity is just connecting things.
When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty.
Because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something.
It seemed obvious to them after a while.”
Thankfully, with USPOV®s you don’t need products to be different. Just how people see them.
Because it’s our opinions and feelings about a product - and not specific features - that overwhelmingly influence our buying decisions.
In fact, rational considerations often get completely overridden simply because our emotions make our minds up for us before the analytical parts of our brains have the chance to fully engage.
Our gut reactions essentially veto the spreadsheet.
This is why marketing doctrine rightly asserts, don’t sell the product - sell the experience.
So, unlike USPs, USPOV®s are fundamentally not about products.
They’re about the lives, views and experiences of the people who might buy them.
Which is a creatively rich environment.
And where most of the overtaking lanes are to be found.
“Creativity is just connecting things.
When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty.
Because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something.
It seemed obvious to them after a while.”
So how do we create uspov®s?
It starts with the brief. Or more specifically, deciding on which kind of brief to use.
Because, while we are happy to entertain any kind of brief a client prefers, we find that two methods usually generate the best creative work:
- The Objectives Only brief method
- The Open brief method
Objectives Only briefs
Objectives Only briefs are like traditional briefs, but with one crucial difference. They don’t include key insights or single-minded propositions.
In other words, the section of the traditional client brief that always causes the most pain for clients, and agencies, is removed.
Making the whole process a lot less stressful for everyone.
Clients still get to control all the specifics they want to on a particular project, i.e. objectives, requirements and deliverables, without the headache of trying to come up with something original to say about their product.
That is, quite literally, our job.
Open briefs
Open briefs are ideally suited to finding, or seeing, USPOV®s.
If you’re not familiar with this kind of brief, you could be forgiven for thinking that they’d give agency creatives license to do whatever the hell they like, without considering the business consequences for their clients. An understandably frightening prospect.
But this couldn’t be further from the truth.
Open briefs are only used when everyone involved, especially creatives, are deeply informed about a client’s business.
To earn trust, you need to be prepared to learn.
One of the most important qualities of Open briefs is that because there are none of the predetermined objectives, deliverables or key insights/propositions found in traditional briefs, everyone has permission to be more open-minded.
Allowing them to go searching for, and be more receptive to, ideas and solutions that they might never have considered otherwise.
Another significant benefit of Open Briefs is that because they are generally always ongoing, it encourages creatives to always have the client’s product at the back of their minds, open to inspiration at any time.
And this is where our
Goody Bags Come in.
Better creative people, in any field, have one thing in common. They notice things that other people haven’t.
And it’s not because they have some magical ‘creative gene’. It’s because if they’re going to challenge the status quo, they know they have to look harder, for longer.
But, for our advertising creatives, the point of Goody Bags is to make things easier and faster. And ultimately better.
With an emphasis on collaboration between client and agency, the ‘bags’ get filled with every thought-provoking observation that both we and our clients can find about the product we’re trying to sell.
And we do this by thoroughly investigating a. what consumers think about it, and b. how the competition is going about selling theirs, i.e. where are the main roads?
If you think of creativity as ‘joining the dots’ in a different way, finding patterns and making connections between them that others haven’t, then the goal of Goody Bags is to give creatives as many different ‘dots’ to connect as we can find.
To make the search for this hopefully inspirational material as simple as possible, we focus on the two most powerful drivers of consumer purchasing decisions: Desires and Fears.
This is because getting a clear understanding of how these primary motivators are likely to affect people’s opinions about a product is critical to creating work that’s going to be effective.
Desires might attract people to something in the first place, but Fears are generally the biggest influencers when it comes to choosing who to buy from.
It isn’t about finding perfect solutions.
Because they’ve almost certainly been done.
It’s about finding outstanding imperfect ones.
Because they hopefully haven’t.
