Distinctive brand assets: what they are, why they beat differentiation, and how to build one

In 1915 the Coca-Cola Company asked glassmakers for a bottle a person could recognise by touch in the dark, or identify from a broken shard on the ground. The Root Glass Company of Terre Haute, Indiana won with a shape its designer Earl R. Dean took from an encyclopaedia illustration of a cocoa pod, and the contour bottle was standard across the business by 1920. It has been doing the same job for more than a century.

That brief is the whole theory of distinctive brand assets in one sentence, written seventy years before the theory had a name. The point of the bottle was not to say anything about Coca-Cola. It was to make sure that whenever anyone saw the shape, the brand arrived in their head without being asked.

What a distinctive asset is

The term belongs to the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute at the University of South Australia, and specifically to Jenni Romaniuk, whose Building Distinctive Brand Assets was published by Oxford University Press in 2018. A distinctive asset is any non-brand-name element, a colour, a shape, a character, a sound, a line or a typeface, that triggers the brand name in a buyer’s memory. The asset is a shortcut. It lets the brand be noticed and recalled in the two seconds a shopper gives a shelf or a feed.

The reason this matters comes from the institute’s director Byron Sharp, whose How Brands Grow, also from Oxford University Press in 2010, argued that brands grow mainly by being easy to think of and easy to buy: mental availability and physical availability. Mental availability is not awareness. It is the probability that your brand comes to mind in the moments when someone is actually about to buy, across all the different ways they might think about the category. Distinctive assets are how a brand gets refreshed in memory without spelling its name out every time.

Why distinctiveness beats differentiation

Differentiation is the claim that your product is meaningfully different from the alternatives. Distinctiveness is the fact that people can tell it is yours. Most marketing strategy has been written about the first, and most buyers behave according to the second. The Ehrenberg-Bass research on buyer behaviour finds that people in a category see rival brands as broadly similar, buy several of them, and pick largely by which one they notice and remember at the moment of choice.

That is why a differentiated brand with weak assets is in trouble and a distinctive one with an ordinary product is not. Cadbury’s purple does not claim that the chocolate is better. It claims the shelf.

The purple, Pantone 2685C, was worth enough that Cadbury spent the best part of two decades trying to register it, losing in the Court of Appeal in October 2013 after Nestlé challenged the wording “predominant colour”, and finally winning two of three revised applications in the High Court in October 2022. No company litigates for twenty years over a point of difference. It litigates over an asset.

The two measures: fame and uniqueness

Romaniuk’s contribution was to make the idea measurable, and the measurement is simple enough to run in any category. Show category buyers the asset on its own, with no brand name, and ask which brand it belongs to. Fame is the proportion of buyers who link it to your brand. Uniqueness is the proportion of all the links the asset generates that go to you rather than to a competitor.

Plot the two on a grid and the picture is instant. An asset with high fame and high uniqueness, in the top right, can stand in for the name: the arches, the bottle, the purple.

High fame and low uniqueness is the trap most brands fall into, because it means the asset is famous for the category and a rival will collect the memory you paid for. Low fame and high uniqueness is potential, an asset that is yours but that nobody has seen enough. Low on both means either stop, or start spending.

The grid’s value is that it removes taste from the argument. A creative director’s favourite device and a founder’s favourite colour both have to survive a survey of people who do not care, and the survey usually shows that brands own far fewer assets than they think. Most of what a brand guidelines document calls “our distinctive identity” is, when tested, either shared with the category or unknown.

The categories of asset, and who owns one

Colour

Colour is the fastest asset to process and the hardest to own, because there are only so many of them and every rival can use one. Tiffany’s blue has been on the cover of its Blue Book since 1845, is produced by Pantone as a private colour numbered 1837 after the year of the company’s founding, and has been a registered colour trademark since 1998. Cadbury’s purple needed a decade in court before the 2022 registrations. Both show that colour ownership is built by repetition over generations and defended by lawyers, not chosen in a rebrand.

Shape

The contour bottle is the canonical shape asset. The Golden Arches are the other, and their origin is instructive: architect Stanley Meston drew them in late 1952 as the roof structure for the first franchised McDonald’s in Phoenix, and it was only in 1962 that Jim Schindler, the company’s head of engineering and design, turned them into the “M” logo. The asset existed as a building before it existed as a mark, which is why it was already famous when it went on the sign.

Character

A character starts with uniqueness of 100%, because you invented it, and only has to earn fame. That is why Aleksandr Orlov took comparethemarket.com from an unmemorable name in a category of near-identical sites to the brand people could actually recall, and why he has been in the advertising since January 2009 without a break. The case for invented characters over hired celebrities, with System1’s evidence on fluent devices, is made in full in our piece on brand mascots.

Sound

Sound is the asset that works when the screen is not being watched, which is most of the time. The Intel chime, composed by Walter Werzowa in 1994 for the Intel Inside programme, has been rearranged over the years to keep it current but never replaced, and it identifies a component brand most buyers never see. In Britain the clearest example is a jingle attached to a Christmas advert.

Coca-Cola’s “Holidays Are Coming” has been on British television at Christmas since 1995, and the opening notes of it now do what the bottle does. The trucks, the lights and the song are three assets in one film, and the company has been careful to change the execution while keeping all three.

Tagline and typeface

A line becomes an asset when people can finish it for you, and the ones that reach that point tend to stay for decades. The economics of that, and the lines that have earned it, are in our guide to advertising slogans that work. Typefaces are the weakest category on the grid for most brands, because few people can name a font, but a sufficiently odd one, in the same colour, in the same place, does become recognisable as a pattern even when it is not recognised as a typeface.

How brands damage their own assets

Assets are destroyed far more often by their owners than by competitors. In February 2009 Tropicana replaced the orange with a straw in it, the image that had identified its cartons for years, with a stemmed glass of juice and a vertical wordmark.

Sales fell 20% in two months and the company put the old pack back. Nothing about the juice had changed. The shopper simply could not find it.

Gap did the same to its logo on 4 October 2010, swapping the blue box for Helvetica with a small square in the corner, and reversed it on 11 October, a week later. Both cases share a cause: a management team that thought the asset was tired, because they looked at it every day, when the audience had barely finished learning it.

The subtler damage is drift. A colour that shifts a few shades with each agency, a character redrawn to look more contemporary, a sonic logo shortened to save a second of airtime, a line rewritten by a new marketing director who wanted their own. None of these registers as a mistake at the time. Each one lowers fame a little, because the thing people learned no longer quite matches the thing they see.

The opposite move, confidence in the asset, looks like Mastercard dropping its name from the logo in January 2019 and leaving only the two overlapping circles. That is a brand reading its own grid and concluding that the shape had reached the top right corner. Most brands cannot do it, and most brands should not try, but the test of a distinctive asset is whether you could.

How to build one

• Measure before you decide. Run the fame and uniqueness survey on every element in your guidelines, and accept that most of them will score badly.
• Pick one or two candidates, not ten. An asset needs the whole media budget behind it to reach fame; a palette of eight gets none of them there.
• Choose for uniqueness first. Anything a rival could plausibly use is building category memory that the market leader will bank.
• Put it where the buying happens. The bottle was designed for the hand and the arches for the roadside; an asset that only lives in the television advert does half a job.
• Fix the specification and write it down: the Pantone reference, the exact notes, the character’s proportions and voice. Drift is the commonest way assets die.
• Change the story, never the asset. Coca-Cola changes the film and keeps the trucks; Compare the Market changes the plot and keeps the meerkat.
• Test any redesign against the current version with real buyers before it ships. Tropicana and Gap were both a fortnight of research away from not happening.
• Register what you can. Tiffany’s blue and Cadbury’s purple are protected because the companies spent the money and the years to protect them.
• Re-measure every year or two. Fame decays without spend, and uniqueness decays whenever a rival gets close, and neither is visible from inside the building.