How many Distinctive Brand Assets is too many?

Also, what does Distinctive even mean?

Last week, we talked about taglines, and one of our many eagle-eyed readers asked us a fantastic question …

“How many Distinctive Brand Assets should I have?”

Brilliant question. Love it. Thank you. Let’s dive in.

(By the way, this edition of the SRH Empirical Marketing Dispatch is absolutely not possible without “Building Distinctive Brand Assets” by Jenni Romaniuk of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science. It’s hands down the best book on this stuff. If you want to borrow a copy, we have a few left.)

You already know what Brand Assets are. They’re your logo, colors, font, your jingle or sonic cues, your mascots or characters, your shapes and packaging. Their purpose — and they have one purpose — is to trigger your brand in the minds of buyers and potential buyers.

A brand asset is Distinctive if and only if it is both famous and unique. And what does that mean?

Let’s start with Fame. Brand assets are famous if they are widely known (duh), and the goal is 100% across all category buyers and potential category buyers. If that sounds like a lot of buyers, it is. Reach is everything. Attention is everything else, and we’ll talk about that a little more in the future.

Almost everyone on Earth knows the Nike swoosh. Maybe you’re not aiming to reach everyone on Earth (yet), but your audience is probably larger than you might think.

Some assets are more famous than others. Logos, mascots, jingles and sonic cues tend to have higher fame scores than brand assets like taglines or colors. Chester Cheetah is famous. Jake from State Farm is famous. The Noid was very famous, and then he wasn’t because Dominos stopped using him in their ads. But they brought him back in 2021 for a bit, so maybe he is a little famous again? Anyway …

If your brand has a mascot you haven’t used for 30 years, it will still be relatively famous with older category buyers. Conversely, if your mascot only shows up on, say, TikTok, chances are older buyers — and older buyers absolutely buy stuff — might have no idea who you are.

How do you make a brand asset famous? Use it everywhere in everything all the time for a very long time. Measure, rinse, repeat.

So let’s talk about uniqueness. A brand asset is 100% unique if it is associated with your brand and your brand alone. Impossible? Of course. But as we learned last week, impossible is nothing.

One of the problems Energizer had in the late 1980s and 90s was that Duracell had been running ads featuring battery-powered bunnies for about 15 years. It’s likely that even though the Energizer Bunny was clearly coded for Energizer, those associations with Duracell were still pretty strong. Look like you, not your competitors. Speaking of which …

The Gucci and Chanel logos are also wildly similar. Chanel was first, though only by a few years.

Confusion is bad, especially within the same category, and you’re aiming to be a consideration set of one. When a buyer sees one logo, there’s a good chance the other brand will come to mind.

A lot of brand logos have a swoosh, though not the Nike swoosh, because they’d be sued to hell. A couple of months back, a Reddit user named G1ngerBoy posted this infuriatingly difficult “match the swoosh to the brand” challenge to the r/graphic_design subreddit.

None of them are Nike. We’re pretty sure #11 is the Capital One swoosh. We think #16 belongs to Nerf? No clue about the rest. The point of the challenge is that no matter the color (and there are really only two colors here), swooshes are obviously not unique.

To be fair, consumers are pretty good at telling the difference between brands, even if their logos are ridiculously similar. One of these is Pepsi. The other is Korean Air.

Korean Air. The choice of a new generation. Yes, context matters, and it’s unlikely you’d find both of these brands at Target.

Characters, logos and fonts generally score higher for uniqueness. With some notable exceptions, taglines, pack and product shapes are generally in the middle. Colors are at the bottom. For example, roughly a billion fast food brands use red and white, including Five Guys, Chick-fil-A, and Dairy Queen.

A higher fame score means the brand asset is more likely to cue your brand in the minds of category buyers.

A higher uniqueness score means the asset will trigger your brand and only your brand in the minds of category buyers.

Quick! Which brand is this an ad for?

McDonalds? Sure. Burger King? Maybe. Chipotle? Uh … not with that yellow? Mars Tourism (because it kind of looks like an abstract painting of a sunset on Mars)? Here’s the answer …

The logo, mascot and “finger lickin’” make it obvious, but those colors are associated with at least two other very famous brands in the category. Ideally, you want people to associate your brand assets with your brand and your brand alone.

Obviously, it’s impossible to control that entirely. Nike has invested billions over the last four decades to make sure that when we see the Nike logo, we all think and feel good things about Nike sportswear.

But I also happen to closely associate Nike with Adidas. I associate Adidas with Run-DMC, and then I think of Aerosmith because Run-DMC resurrected their careers with the dope-ass, rock/rap crossover “Walk This Way.” From Aerosmith, we get to the movie “Armageddon” starring Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck. Affleck sounds like Aflac, and now I’m thinking about Gilbert Gottfried as the voice of a duck … but I’m absolutely not thinking about Nike anymore. I’m actually thinking about Capital One because Jennifer Garner was married to Ben Affleck. And now I’m thinking about Dunkin’. Marketers can’t control these kinds of associations. The only thing we can do is be relentlessly consistent across every single channel.

What does this mean for you?

A recent paper by researchers at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute showed that consumers are pretty good at telling brands apart. No one confuses Chick-fil-A with KFC, even though they both use the same colors and sell chicken. No one confuses Smokey Bear with Snuggle the Fabric Softener Bear, even though they’re both bears. While important, uniqueness seems to be slightly less important than fame.

Marketers, on the other hand, tend to wildly overestimate the fame of their brand assets. Why? Because we live with them day in and day out. From the paper:

“For brand identity, marketers’ high level of involvement with their brands (and their competitors) means their exposure to brand elements is much more frequent and engaged compared to consumers (Romaniuk 2018). Therefore, marketers’ memory networks related to brand elements are likely to be more comprehensive, stronger, and easier to access than consumers’ memory networks for the brand. It is plausible, then, that the false consensus effect would apply to marketers’ intuitive judgements on the value of brand elements.”

Surely everyone must know and love our brand the way we do, right? They don’t. Our brands are seared into our minds in ways that just aren’t possible for regular buyers.

So, back to our original question … how many Distinctive Brand Assets should you have? According to Jenni Romaniuk, “Each Distinctive Asset is a substantial, long-term investment to build and sustain in the face of competitor activity.” More is not better.

So let’s say you have a logo, fonts, colors, packaging, a tagline and a mascot or character. That’s six, which is generally right around where you want to be. This isn’t a prescription, though. Maybe you have five brand assets that you can reliably invest in. Seven might be pushing it, but one size does not fit all.

Wondering if your Brand Assets are Distinctive? Give us a call. We can absolutely help you figure that out. Need a new Brand Asset? We love to create them. And if you have a question related to marketing effectiveness, we’ll do our level best to answer it.

See you next time!

Sources!

Building Distinctive Brand Assets – Jenni Romaniuk
Assessing branding strength: comparing marketer judgement and consumer data for brand identity elements – Ruby Brus, Nicole Hartnett, Margaret Faulkner & Carl Driesener