Distinctive Brand Assets (or distinctive assets) have come to the fore as a critical component of marketing effectiveness, with massive credit due to experts such as Jenni Romaniuk of the Ehrenberg Bass Institute in breaking down the marketing science behind the topic in the seminal book “Building Distinctive Brand Assets”.
Now at the forefront of marketing science and effectiveness, understanding what your distinctive assets are and making a plan for how they are activated are crucial steps for any brand to take (see more here on Distinctive Brand Asset research and tracking).
Below we break down why they are so crucial for your brand, along with an overview of the main types of assets you can use to propel your brand forward. You can also download our guide to distinctive assets here.
The first job of advertising is to be noticed; the second job is for them to know it’s you. Distinctive Brand Assets enhance creative effectiveness, increasing the likelihood of consumer recognition, recall, and memory association. A diverse range of assets helps encode ads in consumers’ brains, something a brand name just won’t do alone.
And it’s not just a case of mentioning the brand several times; there is no correlation between branding scores and the number of times a brand is mentioned1. Without plastering your logo everywhere (which itself is a blind spot), distinctive assets improve media efficiency and creative effectiveness. You can see uplifts of at least 34% where distinctive assets are embedded & used2 and with distinctive assets of note gain a 62% higher ROI than the average campaign3.
Ultimately, better branding of your communications will improve effectiveness and salience.
Distinctive assets improve how easily your brand comes to mind. They create shortcuts (mental heuristics) for consumers, the vast majority of whom neither care nor know anything about brands like us marketers. They create more dimensions for how brands come to mind in purchase and consumption occasions.
On average, brands with strong assets are 52% more salient than their rivals4, i.e. they are much more likely to spring to mind when consumers are shopping within the category. Consider how Corona comes to mind at a beach bar, thanks to the lime. Or how a tin of Pringles pops into your head on the way to the confectionary aisle. Creating a brand that is salient, i.e. comes to mind at purchase or consumption, is one of the most essential factors in how brands grow. Distinctive Brand Assets help get you there.
The logo is the foundational asset for all brands. However, since it is commonly used across all touchpoints, discussions on improving distinctiveness often focus on other types of assets. That said, because so much cascades down from the logo, it can significantly influence a brand's direction when planning for distinctiveness. A well-embedded logo with depth and other features allows for creative usage and flexibility, opening the door for colours, shapes or even characters to play wider roles. In recent times, we have seen a design trend emerge, resulting in the pairing back of brand logos, a reductionist approach to logos, and, in many ways, the removal of elements of a brand or logo. Read more about our research and the watchouts to logo updates here.
While iconic taglines may readily come to mind, these are often associated with global giants like Nike or Apple. In reality, embedding taglines is a challenging task that requires consistent use, creativity, time, prioritisation, and substantial budgets. Test it yourself; can you recite the tagline of Adidas or Samsung? This is not to undermine the importance of taglines in fostering distinctiveness, but caution is warranted when relying solely on them to connect marketing activity.
Of the best-in-class examples, “Have a break, have a _______” is a tagline which goes beyond words, creating a wider creative platform for the brand. Delve deeper into the challenges of embedding taglines and gain insights on how to elevate distinctiveness in your brand messaging in our recent research piece here.
Having a distinctive approach to advertising pays back handsomely. When your advertising looks like you, it ensures your communications are linked and attributed back to your brand. It enhances creative effectiveness, increasing the likelihood of consumer recognition, recall, and memory association. But a logo isn’t enough on its own and can be a blind spot.
A distinctive ad style can help you stand out amongst the plethora of brands you compete with in the battle for attention. Following safe category norms in advertising can often just benefit the category leader. While category codes are sometimes required (for communicating Category Entry Points, for example), the brands that plough their own path stand out in the sea of sameness.
With all these challenges and the realisation that a good chunk of advertising reach is simply just a small nudge to remind people your brand exists, a key focus for brands is in creating a distinctive approach to advertising, which helps negate the aforementioned issues. Individual DBAs, such as characters, icons or jingles, amongst other asset types, can do a lot of the heavy lifting when featured as the hero in advertising. Some brands, however, look to create a distinctive ad style, and the ad style in its own right becomes a Distinctive Brand Asset. Read more about distinctive advertising styles and approaches here.
Often underutilised in modern times, audio devices are another weapon in creating a distinctive brand. It could be said that jingles, one such format, are a microcosm of marketing, an incredibly hard-working device that has gone out of favour in preference of trendier concepts.
Some of the most successful instances involve brands using audio to reinforce taglines or brand names, such as McDonald’s with “I’m Lovin’ It,” or iconic jingles like “Ho ho ho, Green Giant” and “Did Somebody Say Just Eat.” (Learn more about why jingles are considered one of the most underutilised asset types here.)
To find out more about Distinctive Brand Asset measurement, or to gain help in understanding the performance of your brand through a quantitative assessment, contact us today. Alternatively, download our distinctive asset playbook here www.distinctivebat.com/distinctive-assets-guide.
Brands of all sizes can start improving the standing of their Distinctive Brand Assets. The first step is to undertake distinctive asset research; an audit of your assets helps you understand your actual performance relative to competitors.
This research will help you unpick your best-performing brand assets and determine which to double down on. It will also help you identify any watch-out assets that are being misattributed to competitors. It will uncover which assets may need more work, adaptation, and/or creative application, and, finally, allow you to benchmark and track performance over time.
We will use the Distinctive Brand Asset grid as the main visual aid, plotting asset performance by brand and asset type. Our research reports are also action-oriented, offering recommendations to propel your brand forward.
