Creating a Profitable Brand: Craft a Unique Selling Proposition That Sells!

1. Intro: Hey, guys. My name is Haylee Powers. I'm the owner and the creator of Bad Bitch Branding, where I worked to empower people through brand strategy and design. I bring out everyone's badass ideas and I make them even more badass and create something really compelling. I work with a lot of startups, fashion brands, and restaurants. What I do is I help them create a compelling difference to make people choose them over their competitors. I absolutely love working with people that give a shit about helping others in any form. It could be through restaurants, like I said, or even a fashion line. I think branding is the most important thing you can do for your business. It is the entire livelihood of your business. I say that if you can brand something, you can definitely sell it. Today, what we're going to go through is why do we need branding, what it is, and how to start creating this unique selling proposition and this unique difference that will have people coming to you over your competitors. Let's go. 2. What Is Branding?: All right, guys. This section will be about what branding is. Branding is the most powerful form of design. Getting a pastry and Mr. Holmes bake shop is just so much more charming when you're going in and you're having this brand experience. Here are some pictures of Mr. Holmes bake shop in San Francisco. I literally went to San Francisco for Mr. Holmes or kind of. I was there, but I made this very special trip because I had seen the brand online, which tells you a brand's very powerful. At Mr. Holmes, they have a sign that says, "I got baked in San Francisco." They're really funny and cutesy. They worked to make a really eclectic energy, as well as a fun and vibrant sort of vibe. I also had to learn about the cruffin because Mr. Holmes has a cruffin count down on their website. It says right here, 12 hours, 59 minutes, and 56 seconds until cruffin in time. So they don't need to put this on their website. They could just put "Cruffins are made at 8:00 AM", or something like that on their door, but they do all of this stuff to create a brand experience and that hype and energy to these cruffins. If you're wondering what cruffin is, a cruffin is a croissant muffin with pastry feeling on the inside. My absolute favorite part about Mr. Holmes is that they really live up to their brand promise. The way that I see them online is really fun and high-quality, and the way that I experienced them when I actually went to the shop was the exact same. The pastries tasted good. We see some brands that aren't living up to their promises and Mr. Holmes is not one of them. They're doing a great job. You'll see here, this is their Instagram. You get the general vibe. It's very clean. It feels very millennial and fun with the neon. It's also very artsy in a way. Their pastries are seen as art pieces almost if that makes sense. Aron Tzimas, the identity designer for Mr. Holmes bake shop said, for the baked goods box, the idea was simple. Make everyone who bought a received baked goods from Mr. Holmes feel special. We wanted our packaging to represent the quality that was inside. Too often, you see bakeries just stamp a plane craft paper box and even though we knew this was the much more expensive option, we knew that we wanted it to feel like you're receiving a birthday present. Maybe you aren't into delicious baked goods and you'd rather burn the calories from your lunch or maybe you ate a cruffin and now you need to burn those calories, I love this brand a lot. I haven't been in-person. They're called monster cycle. I see Monster Cycle is SoulCycle but more soulless. Monster Cycle features a lot of fun typography. They also use curse words. Right here these locker say, "Don't fuck with my shit." They feature a pentagram in their yoga room and their biking room is decked out with Matt Black bikes, a DJ booth, and a big screen that comes down for people to watch while they're biking. The really fun thing about Monster Cycle is that they have a parental advisory at the start of each class and they also embrace different types of music, which is what they say sets them apart. They embrace music like golf, pop, punk, trap music, and they also have something called Metal Mondays, where they play metal music for the rides on Mondays. The owner, Michael, wanted to really create authentic experience while creating a fitness slash club destination. He really has accomplished that with creating this hybrid basically of an event/workout. I want to introduce you guys if you don't know already to Black Beard. He was a pirate active in 1716-1718 and I have here as a little note that he was scary dude and he worked very hard to have this perception about himself. What Black Beard would do is, when he saw another pirate ship coming in, he would tie fuses into his beard and light them on fire in order to have his beard looked like it was engulfed in flames. His face would be smoking, basically. He did this to alter the perception that people had about him when they would see him. His whole brand was about terror. I want to ask you guys and you can answer back, but what are some brands you like and why do you like them and what kind of feelings do these brands evoke? In general, we learned that brands should give us the feeling of association. Brand should make us feel happier, smarter, healthier, safer, richer, more secure, more attractive, and more successful. Of course, they don't have to hit on all of these things, but they must make us feel one. We even start to tie our identity into brands. Have you guys seen people argue about Apple versus Microsoft or maybe the iPhone versus Android? It's a really common brand debate I guess that people have. Another thing that people really tie their identities into is sports brands. People cry over their teams losing and it's because it's not just a team or a brand but it's a part of them at this point if that makes sense. In general, a brand is an idea, a gut feeling, and a story that lives in your customer's mind. A brand is a promise that your customer believes in, and a brand is an emotional experience that your customer has when they interact with you on any level. So branding is how all of the parts of a company work together to create one image. Your brand is not your logo. A lot of people come to me and they believe that branding is a logo. It's much, much more than that. One of my favorite case studies of branding is Marilyn Manson. Social Strauss, a brand strategists said, Marilyn Manson is not a good singer, he is not a good guitar player, and he is not a good songwriter. He has known that from the beginning. Instead of standing around and hoping people would know who he is, he decided he would create an identity for himself and he's executed it flawlessly. He has created a name, a demeanor, and created this concept of the Anti-Christ superstar. The man's name is Bryan Warner. He loves his family and he has been married in civil ceremonies, and he does not bite the heads off of chickens. He is just trying to ask you a question. 3. Why Do We Need Branding?: Why do we need branding? The first reason is that we live in an over-communicated society. So it's estimated that we see thousands of ads each day and there are millions of businesses alone in the US. So just throwing out our logo is not going to make a difference in this over-communicated society. There are ads bombarding us from everywhere. Everyone's trying to sell us something through text messages, through billboards, through junk mail, which is really annoying when you get a whole stack of junk mail every day, through YouTube, where I was trying to watch a John Mayer video earlier, his new song, New Light, and all of a sudden there's an ad ruining my vibe at the beginning. Ads are everywhere. Our defense to all of this over communication is a simple mind. Psychologist Barry Schwartz wrote a book called The Paradox of Choice, where he makes an observation about free choice and argues that eliminating consumer choices can greatly reduce anxiety for shoppers. Customers will end up choosing and paying more for products they've heard of. Big brands are recognizable and give the consumer an easy and simple choice. The well branded product or service will not get lost in a sea of similar products and services. What we must do is oversimplify our message, and that's what the USP is all about. What will branding do for you? A brand identity will help differentiate your business from your competitors. A brand will help manage the perception your customers have about you, a lot like Blackbeard, how he was managing how people saw him. A brand will build equity, brand awareness and loyalty. Great brands form emotional attachments and trust. A brand will help highlight your unique attributes, and like we said before, customers will pay more for a brand they believe delivers outstanding service or benefits. We know for sure that a solid brand makes selling easier. We know that strong brands can charge premium prices, which is great depending on how you're being branded. We brand and we create a unique selling proposition to turn a commodity into a true brand. Commodities are things like coffee, shoes, and cars, and brands are things like Starbucks, Nike, and Mercedes Benz. 4. Neuroscience And Branding: One of the reasons why I love branding is because it combines art and science. Brand strategists have worked with neuroscientists and psychologists to learn more about how our brains react to certain things. Al Ries said, "pour a bottle of Gallo into an empty 50-year-old bottle of French Burgundy, then carefully decant a glass in front of a friend and ask for an opinion. You taste what you expect to taste". Daryl Weber wrote a book called Brand Seduction, and he highlights a really interesting study about medication. He said, "In pharmaceuticals, though private label brands (store brands) have a larger and often growing share of the market. It is amazing that the much more expensive branded products still sell as well as they do. In CVS you can buy 300 tablets of Advil for $2099 or $0.70 per tablet. The CVS-branded Ibuprofen, which contains the exact same medicine at the same dosage, and is held to the same safety and effectiveness standards by the FDA, costs only $0.24 per tablet. When you put the Advil name on the bottle, the same product becomes three times more expensive. Why is this? This is because Advil has taken time to create their brand strategy and design, in a certain way to make us feel and believe that their product is superior to the generic store brands. Advil creates a powerful gut feeling in their consumers. We learned that our brand experience is shaped by the way in which we are looking at a product or service. We tend to make a lot of associations on a subconscious level. When we first see a product we take in visually. We then begin processing the information through the thalamus and the amygdala. The amygdala, where memory and emotion combine, give meaning to what we see and create a gut feeling about a product. The Hippocampus also plays a large role in associating an emotion with a product or service. It is responsible for encoding details and facts into the long term. What you get is not what you get. What you perceive is what you get. Professor Plassmann, Associate Professor of Marketing in INSEAD, did a study where she took two bottles of wine. One bottle had a $10 price tag whereas the next bottle had a $90 price tag. The thing about this wine, was the exact same in each bottle, but the participants did not know this. She found out that participants were drawing real pleasure from the experience they had with the $90 bottle of wine. Even though the wind was the same in each bottle, the participants didn't have the same experience with the $10 bottle of wine. After looking at the brain, Plassmann determined that the price tag and the way the wind was branded as expensive had a real physiological effect on how the wine tasted, even though they were the exact same. The medial orbitofrontal cortex became more active in those drinking the Price, here vintage. We learn that branding is all about emotion, but it's also about our subconscious mind and our brain. Sarah Hyndman is a graphic designer and she did another study just like this, but with jelly beans. She took two groups of people, gave them each the same Jelly Bean and had one group look at soft text and another group look at jagged text. She found that the group looking at the soft text felt the Jelly Bean was 17 percent more Sweet, versus the group looking at the jagged text where they found that the Jelly Bean was 11 percent more sour. Your brain has an immense power and the way that we shape our USP and our brand around certain things can control the way people perceive us. What you perceive is what you get. Keep that in mind when you're creating your unique selling proposition and making it tangible in the lessons to come. 5. Unique Selling Proposition (USP): We're finally to the unique selling proposition which this whole Skillshare video is totally about. Let's look at what Sophia Amoruso said about her brand. Sophia Amoruso said, "Had I tried to fit in, Nasty Gal would have crashed and burned along time ago. The last thing the world needs is another boring person or another boring brand. So embrace all of the things that make you different." Sophia Amoruso's brand, maybe did crash and burn later on, but it's because she changed up her unique selling proposition. She started out just selling unique pieces that were vintage, and then she went to a Forever 21 model, which really mess with her unique selling proposition. But at the beginning, she tried to really stand out and differentiate, and it did suit her very well. Remember we talked about commodities. Things like coffee, shoes and cars. Then brands, are things like Starbucks, Nike, and Mercedes Benz. This is the whole point of the unique selling proposition is to give us a strong focus and a strong unique difference. Your USP is your brand's name plus your number one unique specialty. This will be one short sentence, and no one else should be able to claim the same unique selling proposition that you have, which makes it difficult. Discovering your USP can take awhile depending on what you're selling or what your service is. Let's look at some good examples. A great example is Volvo, the number one safest car. Volvo can say this because they've proven that they are the safest by doing studies. Two, TOMS. Buy a pair, give a pair. So TOMS shoes, when you buy a pair, they give pair to someone in need. That's very unique. Three, voodoo doughnuts, the doughnut shop tourist attraction. I don't know if you have a voodoo doughnuts by you, but we have one in Denver now, and it's very fun and eclectic. It's also a little bit edgy, and people come to take selfies in front of the sign, and I think that voodoo doughnuts is actually even on the Travel Channels. Also they can say that they're to the doughnut shop tourists checked in. There's lot of tongue twisters right there. Do not fear choosing one unique difference. Some of my clients worry that this will loose them business, but I assure you, it will do the opposite. Finding a strong niche is very important. Do not worry also about using all of your unique attributes at once. Pick one unique attribute and build your brand off of that. A USP will set you apart in your industry, a USP will make your difference so clear that everyone, the manager, the customers, and the janitor can repeat it, and a strong USP will result in more sales, competitive strength, and growth for your business. So think of the USP as the seed. So the USP is the core of our brand. It's where everything starts, and then everything that we do off of our brand, it comes from that seed. So we'll say everything else is the branches. These are called touchpoints. A touchpoint like I said before, is any point of contact between a buyer and a seller. These are your big things like your color palette, your logo design, the language that you use, your social media, your marketing, your collateral, your brick-and-mortar design experience, as well as events. There are so many more things that can be touchpoints. But in general, I want you guys to understand that the USP is the seed, it's the entire core of the brand, and then everything we do comes off of that. 6. USP Categories: All right, so let's start to go over the USP categories. I've created four different ways for you guys to learn to differentiate your brand through a USP. Some of these may overlap, but let's go ahead and get started. The first category would be finding a need and fulfilling it, an existing mutual desire. A great example of someone that found a need and fulfilled it was Sara Blakely from Spanx. She found that a lot of women wanted to be smoothed out under their dresses, or in her case, it was some white dress pants. So she created Spanx, which is an undergarment that basically sucks all your fat in and makes you look better than you really look in real life. She found a existing mutual desire and created this need to fulfill it that had not been done yet. The second category is to specialize in a category. I'm a big fan of this USP option because I feel like it's pretty easy and I feel like almost everyone can do it. Say you sell clothing, we're going call this your base. Whatever you sell is your base. Clothing is not very different, you can get clothes anywhere, it is a commodity. Let's add something on, we call this an extender. We'll add on vintage. Vintage clothing is a little bit different than regular clothing, but it's still not unique enough. So let's add something else on. Let's say it's Parisian, let's say that's your second extender. Maybe you go to Paris and you bring all of these clothes back and you sell them in the US. This may be a crazy business plan, but it's a great example of a strong, unique selling proposition. All of a sudden we have clothing that's vintage and Parisian, it's very different. I haven't seen that. But say you want to take it a step further, maybe you will make your third extender black. Say you sell vintage Parisian black clothing here in the US. Maybe it's clothes from the '50s from Paris, maybe it's from the '70s. But either way, you're differentiating through a category. A brand that does this today that we see a lot is Lush. They sell cosmetics, not so different, but then they add in pure and handmade, vegan and socially responsible to differentiate themselves. The third category I have, this one's really hard and you have to have this already in place. The third category is a non-existing desire, a brand new solution. This is something like what Henry Ford did. He said, "If I'd asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." So he created a brand new solution to a non-existing desire, something people haven't thought of yet. This could be something like an app or some technological advance. The fourth way I have for you guys to differentiate if you choose this one, is through experience. A brand that does this very well is Build a Bear Workshop. You can get a teddy bear anywhere, probably even at the grocery store down the toy aisle. But you can't build a bear and take your niece or nephew or maybe your daughter to have this experience. You can go in and you can build a bear, put a heart in it. You can do all this other stuff. I don't know. I don't frequent Build a Bear, but I know you can pick out their clothes, you can give them a shower and fill them with all sorts of love. 7. Creating the One-Sentence USP: All right guys, so I want to take you through creating the one sentence USP and my strategy for when I do this. I have all four categories here, but you will choose just one category when you make your USP. I just wanted to take you through each of them so you can see my thought process and how it works. Let's start with Category 1, finding a need and fulfilling it, an existing mutual desire. I'm going to go ahead and for each example I'm going to do the same thing, I'm going to say that we sell coffee or we have a coffee shop of some sort. What is your product or service for category one? We'll say (Oops, my pen's not working too well) coffee or a coffee shop. Then we try to find a need. Finding a need and fulfilling it, an existing mutual desire. One need in my city, Denver, that I found is that a lot of the coffee shops are the same. All right, we have our need as that we want to see more authenticity and culture added into a coffee shop in town and it's an existing mutual desire. How can we create a solution to this need? Basically I just start brainstorming and I write out the bad ideas too just to get them out of the way.. Let's say we have a Parisian, oh my gosh for some reason I keep doing Parisian things. A Parisian style cafe with live music everyday. Okay and then maybe we have, let's go with a different culture, maybe we have a true Italian espresso bar with true Italian rituals, as it relates to coffee. Let's think, maybe we have Worlds of Coffee. This could be something like a massive warehouse. Well, big, at least if not massive. A huge warehouse with all different types of coffee shops, like a complex from all over the world. Maybe you can travel to different levels and you have some passport so you can go to an Ethiopian roaster and then maybe an Italian. Maybe it's a really fun experience. Then maybe we just have a regular coffee shop with rotating rosters, maybe. Maybe they can rent it out for a month or so and maybe these are just across Denver. But it's also offering a different culture that comes in, maybe they have different styles of coffee, maybe it's regional coffee. We can really go on with this exercise for ever but let's try to pick one. We have our need, which is that we need more authenticity culture, added into our coffee shops here. One that I think really stands out to me is focusing on a true Italian espresso bar with true Italian rituals. Maybe we call this espresso bar Matteo. Then we want to write our one sentence USP, a concise different one sentence USP. (Excuse me.) Your brand's name, Matteo, is the traditional Italian espresso bar with true Italian rituals. This may not be a good USP and we'll find out later when we did the USP test, but you also need, as a business person, to really research a USP and make sure no one else is doing it and make sure you have a market. This is just a really fun exercise to get you guys started. Let's move on to Category number 2 to see how we may begin to differentiate through Category number 2. Category number 2 is to specialize in a category. What is our product or service? Like I said, we're just going to do coffee for each of these or a coffee shop and then I begin listing out categories, all different kinds of categories, even if they're crazy, let's just list them out. Maybe this is an educational coffee shop educating on roasting. Maybe we have a coffee shop that plays metal music. Yes, bitch. Now that's a lightning bolt because lighting bolts mean metal. Maybe we have a late night coffee shop. There's a coffee shop here in Denver that already employs homeless youth I think that's really cool, let's just write that down. Not that we're going to copy them, but we're looking at different categories. Maybe it's a good study space. Maybe we look at the décor, maybe it's modern and contemporary décor. Maybe they do art lessons. Maybe they make sure that their coffee is ethically sourced. Let's see, maybe our coffee shop's attached to a college campus. College kids love a cup of joe to get through those finals. All right. Maybe instead of a college campus, it's in a trendy boutique. I imagine a boutique like a plant store, very trendy plant store that you have to walk through like a forest to get to the back coffee shop. Forest to the back coffee shop. All right? Maybe there's comedy shows. Maybe it's a comedy coffee shop. Then we can look at the location. What kind of location are we in? Are we downtown? Are we in the suburbs? The suburbs have really lame coffee shops, that's a good one. Maybe we have a bar coffee hybrid. Let's see. Maybe there's a place for musicians, a music space. Maybe a bookstore. What about a puppy café? We have cat cafes. Is there such thing as a puppy café yet? It sounds so cute I can't stop doing these little exclamations. What about a lizard café? Now that's whack. That's probably not a good idea. Not a good idea. But it's fun to list out these crazy ideas. Let's look at what we have. We have a lot of different categories. Maybe honestly, I really think late night's a big deal. There's not a lot of great late night coffee shops, let's circle late night. I really believe there are a lot of different combinations here, but I think the ethically sourced would be great, very important. Then maybe it's very modern and contemporary. A lot of late night coffee shops are sometimes run down and gross and sketchy at night. We're going to make this a different late night coffee shop. Let's call this coffee brand Jade Coffee Company. Coffee Co. All right, how about Jade Coffee Co is the ethically sourced late night contemporary coffee shop. Once again, we may or may not find out that this USP is good. You'll definitely need to revisit your USP and do a lot of research while you develop it. This one is hard, this is Category number 3, a non-existing desire and a brand new solution. The reason why this is hard is because it's a non-existing desire and it's a brand new solution no one's ever thought of. Like Henry Ford with the cars instead of the faster horses. Once again, our product or service is coffee. Coffee shop. What is a new solution that does not exist yet? You can see how this is a really hard category to work with. Most of the time you already have this, maybe you already have an app or something that we've never seen before. But just trying to find a non-existing desire and a brand new solution is pretty hard if we don't have that product already, but let's just try. We're in the topic of coffee so let's say a napping coffee shop. Although, I'm not sure this is a non-existing desire because I desire it pretty bad. I want to take a nap and drink my coffee at the same time. What about coffee perfume? Maybe it doesn't smell like coffee, but you get caffeine from it. It's interesting. I don't know if that exists yet. I don't know if anyone desires that yet either. What if we have a coffee shop, the features coffee ceremonies? Like they have tea ceremonies What are coffee retreats? I don't know what these would look like yet, but just thinking of different things, whether it's a good or a bad idea, just get it down. What about medical marijuana, and just marijuana in general is really big industry in Denver. What if we did something with coffee and marijuana? Like coffee infused marijuana? I don't know anything about marijuana, so I don't know if this is dangerous, sounds a little bit crazy but that's an option and that is a big industry, so something with that, some new solution. What if we have a coffee sketchbook? Some of you guys have seen the paper that you, there's like seeds in it and you can plant it when you're done and it grows flowers. Maybe we do that with coffee, so maybe there's a coffee sketchbook that you can grind up when you're done sketching, and you can drink it. That sounds impossible but drink it. Here is our coffee cup for this page. All right, so I'm not sure any of these are great, most of them are crazy ideas, like I said, a lot of people that are doing this have some technological thing that they're doing. They have a new app or something we've never seen before, I think the best option we have here, there's not a lot of great ones, but let's stick to the coffee perfume. Let's call this brand Rush maybe. I imagine this brand being very exclusive and high end maybe in a boutique with a very fun and colorful vibe. I also imagined it being pretty expensive with some really unique brand experiences. What's a Rush is our brand name? Rush is the caffeinated, fun, high end perfume boutique. This is the best I can really do with a non-existing design in brand new solution for this. You can tell this is very different, I don't know if anyone desires this yet, but you would know after you did some research. Let's move on to the fourth category and remember you just pick one of these categories. The fourth one is going to be experience. Our product or service is a coffee shop. Now we ask ourselves, what kinds of experiences do we want to create? So you may already have your ideas. Let's think about what kind of experience you want to create your coffee shops. Maybe you want to create a bold experience, exciting, high tech, or maybe futuristic, well, maybe artsy or classy, maybe a luxurious experience, maybe exclusive, maybe google for calming or organic experience, maybe we go for an empowering experience, maybe we go for inspiring, maybe let's say healthy, like organic but maybe different, maybe it's an outdoorsy experience, maybe it's exotic or foreign feeling, this perform. All right, so let's stop there. I think one of the best options or the most interesting that can give us the best example would probably be high tech and futuristic. Let's think about the touch points and remember a touchpoint is any point of contact between a buyer and a seller. Let's think of some things that could create this high tech, futuristic experience and make it really memorable. Let's say you have them order at an iPad, maybe there's a conveyor belt. I can't spell, conveyor belt that delivers their drinks. Maybe instead of the typical steaming, there's like a heating ray gun to zap the coffee. I think that we should focus on the environment as well. Environment has a lot to do with the experience someone has when they come in contact with your brand. What about clean environment? Maybe it's minimal, with futuristic lighting. Maybe we even wanted to have an eerie, less human feel. Maybe with the ray gun up here. A robot or a robot-like thing, not like an actual robot, but a robot makes the coffee as well. All right, so we'll stop here. You can take this concept as far as you want. But it's all about making this quality experience and differentiating consistently on experience. Let's call this brand Astro, sounds fun. The USP in one sentence would be Astro is the futuristic high tech coffee shop. All right guys, so we differentiate by experience. We have Astro is a futuristic high-tech coffee shop, and we prove that constantly by being consistent with that experience. We have category three, a non-existing desire, a brand new solution. We have Rush, which is the caffeinated, fun, high end perfume boutique. We have category number two, which is specializing in a category. We created Jade coffee company, it's the ethically sourced, late night contemporary coffee shop, and then we have category number one, which is Matteo, finding a need and fulfilling an existing mutual desire. Matteo is the traditional Italian expresso bar with true Italian rituals. I really like this one and I think we'll be coming back to this one for sure. 8. Testing the USP: Once you have your USP, you want to take it through the USP tests. It's very important. The first way that I do this is I ask, can I switch out my brand's name with another brands USP and have the USP still make sense. If you can, your USP is not strong enough. I call this the donut test. Do the donut test [inaudible]. Let's take Winchell's, for example, Winchell's is a doughnut chain and their USP that I found online was home of the warm and fresh donut. They really didn't have a USP. Let's take Winchell's USP home of the warm and fresh donut' and replace their name with Dunkin Donuts. Dunkin Donuts is home of the warm and fresh donut. Does that make sense? Yes, it makes sense because, every donut should be warm and fresh and it's a very generic USP or tagline or whatever they're trying to make it to be. But what if we take Voodoo Doughnut's USP, which is the doughnut shop tourist attraction and replace it with Winchell's. Winchell's is the doughnut shop tourist attraction, does that work? It absolutely does not work. Winchell's is nowhere near what Voodoo Doughnut's is. Another test I'll take you guys through is attached in this lesson. It is the USP test and it's based off of Bill Schley book, Why Johnny can't brand and a test he takes people through. We'll ask if your brand's USP is superlative, important, believable, memorable and tangible. Is your USP superlative, do you claim to be the number one brand in your category? Can you do this service or function better than anyone else? Is your USP important? Does it address an important issue for decision-makers? Will anyone care? Is your USP believable? Can your customers believe that this claim is true? Is your USP memorable? Is there any emotional hook that becomes ingrained in our customer's mind and is memorable all the way through the purchase. Is your USP tangible? Is your USP real? Does it perform as promised? Can your customers stand behind your claim because they've experienced it firsthand? The USP for Voodoo Doughnut's, the doughnut shop tourist attraction, really is a strong USP. Voodoo doughnut is an independent and a collected doughnut shop based in Portland, Oregon. They are a bit edgy, but they also add humor to the overall brand experience. They have these bright pink fund boxes. Everything that they do is super fun. Versus Winchell's, they don't really have a strong difference and they're claiming that their home of the warm and fresh doughnut, which is not a strong USP. If you need to, you can go back and revisit your USP. I create unique selling proposition that need a lot of revising often. It just really depends on what you're selling, what your product is and how strong your USP is. You may need to go back and rework it a little bit. 9. Making the USP Tangible: All right, so this section is all about making the USP tangible. Tjaco Walvis said, "Our brains keep track of the difference between the promised reward and the actual experience. Based on that difference, it adjusts its valuation of the brand, meaning that if your brand promises the world, deliver the moon. When our reward centers get more than expected, they naturally want to return to the source of that experience over and over again." Do not let your USP be worthless. If you claim a certain USP but do not live it fully through all of the touchpoints, no one will know what your USP is. You have to fully own your claim. Let's look at the brand Matteo we created together. Matteo is the traditional Italian espresso bar experience featuring Italian rituals in Denver. That is a USP, the seed, and then everything that comes off of that is the branches. So our colors, the logo design, the interior design, the social media, the rituals that we feature, the marketing, the type of glasses we even use, and the language. What kind of colors do you guys think would fit Matteo's brand? I'm thinking some deep reds, maybe some dark wood, something very very traditional, but also modern. Also, we learn from real Italian espresso bars that most of the time there's very limited seating and you just basically walk up and order. It's also meant to be a social experience where you're talking to the Barista. So we would definitely want to feature those sorts of rituals. We also learned that the cappuccino in Italy is a breakfast drink. It's not really had after the late morning. So we would definitely not want to have cappuccinos be available at all times. We want to really be true to the Italian roots, and I'm not Italian and I don't know anything about it. I just read an article on NPR about Italian coffee shop experience. So if we were to create this, we want to be true to those experiences. I also learned that espresso is often served in glasses in Italy and not in porcelain like we do here. So we'd want to serve it in true glasses. Every possible thing we can do to make Matteo's USP come to life and be believable, and different, and compelling is what we need to do. That could be really anything, but these are just some ideas to start us off. Is your USP quirky and vibrant? If so, create photos, language and design that brings your customer back to this quirky and vibrant USP. You want to live your USP fully or no one will believe you. Trust is a big deal. If you claim to be something and you don't follow through with your clients and customers, your USP becomes worthless and your brand really loses a lot of credibility. Make sure that you're fully living up to your USP and fully living up to the claim you're making and the experience that you're claiming. 10. Conclusion: Hey guys, thank you so much for spending time with me today. This concludes our time together. I hope you've learned a ton. I hope you're super inspired. Go ahead and put your USP down in the comments and I will get back to you on if I think it's strong or not. Remember that it is not a tagline and you must be the only one that can claim this USP. If you guys want to find me, you can find me at BADBITCHBRANDING.COM or you can email me at HAYLEE, H-A-Y-L-E-E, @BADBITCHBRANDING.COM. Bye guys.