Positioning Guide 7

A brand should stand for one, and only one, unique brand benefit.

This game rule was expressed by Ries and Trout, but it was understood even before the concept of brand positioning was widely accepted.  The master of 1950’s hard-sell advertising was Rosser Reeves of the Ted Bates agency.  Reeves advocated the concept of the Unique Selling Proposition, or USP (Rosser Reeves, Reality in Advertising (New York:  Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1961).  His classic television work for Anacin, Listerine, Colgate toothpaste, and Dwight D. Eisenhower presidential campaign continuously repeated the USP for those brands.  Today, advertising people continue to speak of the USP; however, marketing people refer to their brand’s unique brand benefit.  USP -- unique brand benefit, same thing.

Double Benefit Positioning --Sometimes marketers take multiple product attributes or product benefits and wrap them together into a single unique brand benefit or USP.  In almost all beverage categories, the top-of-mind response to the question, “Why do you drink that beverage?” is “I like the taste.”  Moreover, most beverage categories are 80/20 categories. That is, the 20% of the market who are heavy users consume 80% of the category volume.  Soft drinks, dairy products, bottle water, and beer all follow this pattern.  Ask beer drinkers why they drink beer, and they invariably respond that they like the taste.  Miller Lite was a fast follower in the reduced calorie beer category.  The innovator of reduced calorie beer was Tromer’s Red Letter which was introduced in the 1960’s.  The problem with reduced calorie beer was that the category is a male dominated category.  Heavy beer drinkers tend to be men.  A reduced calorie label provokes imagery of a beer for women in the minds of the heavy beer drinking male.  In 1973, to overcome this girly imagery of reduced calorie beer, Miller introduced Lite using male sports celebrities. With the classic themeline, “tastes great/less filling,” Miller Lite established itself as “everything you always wanted in a beer – and less.”  Take the two product attributes, tastes great and less filling, combine them, and they equal one proposition that is very important to heavy beer drinkers … they can drink more of it.

Multiple Benefit Positioning -- Another example of wrapping multiple attributes into a single unique brand benefit is Colgate Total toothpaste.  The largest segment in the toothpaste category consists of mothers who want protection, an internal want/need, for their families.  For 50 years Proctor & Gamble dominated the category in the U.S. with its Crest.  Crest was the first brand with fluoride and the endorsement of the American Dental Association.  It promised cavity protection which was exactly the benefit that mothers wanted; they wanted to protect their families.  Then Colgate introduced its Colgate Total brand which contains an antibacterial ingredient, Triclosan, in addition to fluoride.  Triclosan prevents gingivitis, plaque, tartar, and bad breath; while the fluoride prevents cavities.  Colgate Total promises mothers one unique brand benefit, Total Protection.  While Crest offers mothers protection, Colgate Total offers them total protection.  Which do you think mothers would buy?  Colgate Total gained the number one spot in the toothpaste category in the U.S. 

More recently Crest has responded with its Crest Pro Health brand extension which contains stannous fluoride and sodium hexametaphosphate.  The claims for Crest Pro Health are very similar to those for Colgate Total.  It’s too early to say which brand will be the longer term leader in the category.

Stretching the Brand Position -- Some European marketers tend to stretch their brands much further than do most U.S. marketers.  As an example, in the U.S. Mercedes-Benz is known for its well engineered luxury cars.  If one probes Mercedes-Benz owners, the brand attributes of well engineered and luxury probably translate to unique brand benefits of prestige and/or comfort.  The U.S. product offering consists of sedans, coupes, convertibles, roadsters, SUVs, and wagons.  In Europe, there are additional offerings: at the low priced end in their consumer products, the A and B classes; and for businesses, a complete line of commercial vehicles.  Mercedes Benz USA has not included these models in their product offering as they know that they would tend to erode the luxury image of the brand among Americans.