Sample frameDay 208·Brand Management · Assets

Good morning. Your buyer isn't reading your ad. They're glancing at it, and a quarter-second decides whose colour that is.

Brand Management.

Distinctive Brand Assets

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The question

How many of the people who recognise your colour, your shape or your sound would put a competitor's name to it if you asked them — and what does that do to the price you've been paying for every impression this year? Nobody measures it, because measuring it means writing a rival's name into your own report. The count isn't zero for most brands, and this year's media was bought as though it were.

The idea

Mental & Physical Availability already told you to build distinctive assets and then hold them, past the point where your own team is bored of them. What that morning left open is which assets, and how you would know. Jenni Romaniuk — research professor at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute at the University of South Australia, and Byron Sharp's co-author on How Brands Grow Part 2 — spent a whole book on that question. Building Distinctive Brand Assets (Oxford University Press, 2018) argues an asset is worth only what two numbers say it is worth, read together. Fame: of everyone you show it to, how many say your name. Uniqueness: of everyone who names any brand at all, what share name yours. Notice what is being measured here, because it isn't what the association network measured. That audits what a customer can say about you — verbal, retrieved, slow. Assets work before language does: the colour, the shape, the sound, the silhouette of the pack, caught by somebody glancing rather than reading. And unique means something harder here than a rival couldn't claim it. It means a countable share of your buyers actively credit it to a named rival. Take a colour that thirty-five of a hundred category buyers put your name to, while fifty-five of them put your largest competitor's name to it: fame of 35 per cent, uniqueness of 39 per cent, and a recognition number that looked respectable until you counted the second one. That colour is a donation rather than an asset.

The framework

01
The register — including the assets nobody briefed.
List what you actually have before you score any of it: colour, shape, logo device, typeface, character or spokesperson, sound, phrase, pack silhouette, a recurring layout. Include the ones nobody designed — the founder's voice in the videos, the yellow tape on the box, the way your invoices read — because customers don't sort assets into the ones you chose and the ones you accumulated. Most teams land on four to eight candidates, and are surprised by roughly half of them.
02
One morning, forty strangers, nothing else on the page.
Take each candidate, strip every other identifier out of it, show it to category buyers who aren't all your customers, and ask what brand it is. Write down two counts, not one: how many said you, and how many said any brand at all. Forty people if you can get them, fifteen if you can't — the direction settles long before the sample is respectable. What ruins the test is showing an asset alongside your logo, which measures nothing except their eyesight.
03
Whose memory is your colour actually building?
Fame flatters on its own. A shade of blue that a third of the room puts your name to reads like an asset, right up until you count the half of the room putting a rival's name to the same shade — nearly everybody recognises the colour as somebody's, and most of them don't mean you. It is worth less than nothing if you're the smaller brand, because every use of it funds recall for somebody else. That is the line between an asset you own and a convention you share. It goes unmeasured not because it is difficult — it's the same morning's work as the fame count — but because measuring it means hearing a rival's name come back at you, ten times over, and writing it down each time.
04
The two numbers only mean something read together.
Paired, each asset resolves into one of four instructions — but write the two cut-lines down before you look at your own numbers, because they don't sit at the same height. Fame above 30 per cent is high. Uniqueness above 50 per cent is high. They differ because uniqueness can never read lower than fame on the same asset: the people who named any brand at all can't outnumber the people you showed it to. High on both is yours: use it, everywhere, unchanged. Low fame with high uniqueness is clean but unknown — that's the one to invest behind, and it'll take years rather than quarters. High fame with low uniqueness is co-owned, so either change it enough to reclaim it or stop paying to broadcast it. Low on both isn't an asset, it's a habit, and retiring it frees the budget for the one that could be.

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