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In this edition:

• Column: How To Properly Assess Distinctive Brand Assets

• Inspiration: PUB’s Water Conservation Campaign

• FREE White Paper: The Customer Acquisition Codex

Column: How To Properly Assess Distinctive Brand Assets

The term “distinctive brand assets” (DBAs) was coined by the masterminds at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute years ago.

For so many years marketers flew blind thinking this territory of brand management was reserved only for the creatives.

But this couldn’t be further from the truth.

When it comes to building brands, knowing the strength of your DBAs and how to use them is one of the most pieces of knowledge a manager can have.

Far too often, new managers take on a brand and want to “leave their mark”, and in turn start messing with these sacred assets.

While choosing what new assets to build, prioritizing existing ones with potential and executing them effectively are all equally important in growing a brand, resisting boredom might just be the biggest difference maker between success and failure.

Types of Assets

When people talk about DBAs the first thing that comes to mind are brand mascots.

How can they not?

These are one of the most effective brand assets there are for obvious reasons (which I’ll get to later in this article).

But brand managers have a lot more tools at their disposal:

• Colour assets

• Word assets

• Story assets

• Human face assets

• Music assets

• Shape assets

• Sound assets

• And more

Now, you can probably notice that when it comes to engaging the senses, the above are primarily visual and auditory. There’s an interesting reason for that.

While a manager can choose to create a distinct scent for their brand (e.g., Abercrombie has one and they use it in all their stores), the media landscape is quite limited for anything beyond the visual and auditory.

If you start building a distinct scent, a tactile experience, or even a particular taste, customers only get to experience it in person or after they’ve bought it. This doesn’t do much good for building brands because in order to grow you must acquire new customers, not just delight existing ones.

Therefore, the audiovisual media landscape ties our hands a bit when it comes to reaching customers at scale (at least for now, until some crazy technology comes along).

Human Face Assets

Visual assets go far beyond just logos.

Take human face assets, for example. These can come in the form of spokespeople, celebrities and of course, characters. There are upsides and downsides to each, but this category of assets is one of the most popular among larger brands.

Celebrities, while they score high on fame (which is one of the two key metrics to measure the success of DBAs), they can score quite low on uniqueness (the other metric). This is because when we see a famous face, it activates a series of memories in our brains from where we’ve seen this person before (e.g., a movie, a sports team, or even another commercial) therefore grabbing our attention.

However, when we pick a DBA it needs to work to strengthen OUR brand, not the celebrities’. So, when there is this much mental competition on what to associate that celebrity with, our brand gets lost in a sea of associations.

On the other hand, selecting an unknown spokesperson to represent our brand can be quite effective over the short to medium term, however it requires a lot more work to build its fame. The only problem with this route is that people age/die/get involved in scandals/etc..

So, when planning for a long-term spokesperson for your brand think about some “stereotype” you can build around this person (i.e., a bowl cut, Santa’s hat, a blue dress, etc.) so that when they exit their role as spokesperson you can replace them with someone else that people will immediately recognize because of it.

This brings us to characters. These are without a doubt the most effective DBAs out there, but can be costly to build (i.e., the added costs of creating them, animating them, etc.).

If done properly, characters can immediately become unique when used in categories that are not known for having them, and can quite quickly build enough fame to be remembered if enough mass reach media dollars are put behind them.

Sound Assets

This category of assets includes anything that’s auditory, which is a fantastically strong medium to grab people’s attention.

Our brains are wired to ignore background noise that isn’t dangerous to our survival, but the “cocktail party effect” is one way specific sounds cut through into our conscious minds. This occurs when, for example, you’re at a party and someone says your name — your brain is wired to listen to it and you notice it immediately, even if it isn’t directed at you (because for you, your name scores very high in fame).

But in the world of brand building, there are a few different ways to cut through the noise. Let’s start with non-vocal sounds.

These auditory assets are comprised of trademarked noises that are tied to a particular brand — for example, Intel’s inside sound. Because they are unique, they need to be reinforced at every possible brand touchpoint there is, until it becomes synonymous with it — and even after that you must continue to use it, otherwise it will fade into obscurity.

Vocal sounds are assets built with the human voice. This means that a brand uses a well-known or a little well-known voice (in the latter case, it takes longer to make it recognizable) in order to cut through the noise and connect the message with the brand.

Much like non-vocal sounds, this type of asset works great because even if customers are not paying attention to their TVs, typically the sound is on and registers in the minds of (non)viewers. However, human voices can suffer the same drawback from using celebrities — that is, if the voice is famous, your brand will be competing with several other memories tied to that voice and risks getting lost in a sea of non-branded associations.

This brings us to the last and most effective auditory asset: jingles.

Jingles have lost their coolness factor in recent years, yet have proven again and again to be exceptional DBAs. They are original music pieces with brand-based lyrics, such as the Big Mac ingredient song.

Since jingles are created for a brand, they come with little, if any, mental competition. And since they are brought to life though music, they can be quite easy to remember, and therefore can score high in uniqueness.

Word-Based Assets

Here I’ll focus on one in particular — taglines.

These DBAs, because they can be spoken or written, are quite versatile and have the potential to be highly effective when executed well (i.e.” Give you wings”).

The first thing you must to is determine how long your tagline will be, whether or not you will be leading with a unique word, and if you want them to rhyme.

Luckily for us, studies have shown (Romaniuk, 2018) that none of the above three factors matter all that much when it comes to impacting fame or uniqueness, so don’t waste too mental energy on them.

What actually matters is (in order of importance):

1. Will you layer an audio enhancement element to it (e.g., rhythm, vocal tone, etc.)

2. Will you include your brand name in it?

3. Will it contain a rare word anywhere in it?

4. Will you avoid making a reference to the category or price point?

5. Will you structure it as a question?

If you answered ‘yes’ to all of the above, then you’re well on your way to creating a highly effective tagline with the potential to score high on fame AND uniqueness.

Now, of course don’t try to shove all of that into your tagline. The reality with DBAs is that by nature the more formulaic they are, the less effective they will become as everyone will start using the “winning formula”.

The above factors are ones that have been observed by marketing scientists in experiments for having a stronger correlation with fame and uniqueness. Oftentimes, taglines can only apply one or two of them to avoid looking like a Frankenstein of a sentence.

The World of DBAs is Massive

In this column I’ve only highlighted a few types of distinctive brand assets.

The reality is that this is a major area of branding that so few marketers know anything about, oftentimes leaving it to their creatives to strike gold.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. There has been several studies on how to build them properly and it’s actually not that complicated.

Despite all this empirical evidence, it should never be used as a direction for your creatives. Creativity cannot be formulaic otherwise it risks being dull.

Instead, as brand managers and strategists, we must learn what makes great DBAs and how to properly use them, measure them, nurture them, and apply them.

Only then will you be able to provide meaningful and actionable feedback to what comes back from the creative shop, and confidently hold the line on not reaching for the newest and coolest trend making waves last week.

Inspiration: PUB’s Water Conservation Campaign

Calgary is currently under a State of Local Emergency due to a water main break that got damaged.

In collaboration with the Calgary Chamber of Commerce and the City of Calgary, local business owners and residents are joining forces under the hashtag #everydropcounts social campaign. We're sharing our water conservation efforts to inspire innovative solutions.

While my wife and I have been cutting back on our water usage over the past couple weeks through a variety of ways, I thought it would be to valuable infuse a bit of advertising into this trend.

Earlier this year PUB, Singapore's National Water Agency launched a fantastic campaign on water conservation — which has been a top-of-mind topic in Singapore for many years.

Launched on Singapore World Water Day, the light-hearted film and website promote water conservation with the message, "Save water. Big ways, small ways. All OK!"

By highlighting that small changes can have a big impact, the campaign is addressing Singapore's urgent need to conserve water as demand is projected to double by 2065.

If you don't know exactly what else you could be doing, watch the video below. It not only gives you ideas, but also turns the "sacrifice" on its head by reframing it as a fun mentality to have.

FREE White Paper: The Customer Acquisition Codex

A few weeks ago I've had the pleasure to be on a customer acquisition panel with some of the great marketing minds in Calgary (Alex Paisley, David MacLean, and Michael Gaudet) with the Calgary Marketing Association, led by the great Marc Binkley.

The WJ Agency team and I prepared a Customer Acquisition "Codex" on some of the key concepts we believe to be imperative in understanding this hotly debated topic.

💡 The 95-5 Rule

💡 The Strategic Planning Process

💡 The Difference Between B2C and B2B

💡 Brand Building vs Performance Marketing

💡 And much more

If you're interested in getting a copy, drop a comment in this post and I’ll LinkedIn DM you a copy! (Depending on your LinkedIn settings, you might need to ‘follow’ me first so I can DM you).

More of PPA:

• 🤝 Connect with Pedro on LinkedIn and/or X

• 🍻 Come by the WJ office for a brew

• 💌 In case you missed it:

  • Strategists And Creatives Are Advertising’s Most Formidable Pairing

  • Is Pricing The Most Important Marketing P?

  • How To Sustain Product Innovation

PPA 

Pedro Porto Alegre is a seasoned marketing professional with in-depth experience building brand and communications strategies for top-tier B2C and B2B organizations across Canada. His repertoire extends from crafting and executing integrated multi-media brand marketing campaigns to the commercialization of performance-driven innovations for multimillion-dollar and nascent brands alike.