There are 100 excuses that marketers give for not building distinctive brand assets. Some of these are listed below (this list is by no means exhaustive):
“Our fonts look 2018 - we need to look like 2025”
“That design works on TV, but it looks strange on TikTok - we need a TikTok native visual identity”
“Click through rates on performance ads are dropping - we need a new look”
“I just joined this brand - I don’t like the way it looks and feels”
“We tested orange vs. green, and green won by 4%”
And my favourite one:
“We have been using this color for 2 years - people must be bored”
Customers aren’t bored - you are
You find your brand elements boring. And that’s ok. You are bored because you live in the factory. You see the assets 50 times a day at high resolution. Your customers see them once a month, at low resolution, while scrolling past the feed. To them, your brand isn’t boring. In fact, it's hardly even familiar.
Every time you change the look and feel of the brand - you are flushing down months (or years) of memory structures that your advertising has created.
System 1 vs System 2
Evolutionary psychology tells us that our brain hates thinking. On an average, we make about 35,000 decisions every day - which shoe to tie first, which side on the mouth to start brushing from, which soap to buy etc. For every decision to be rationally processed and thought through, the calories required would be monumental - hence, to manage this cognitive overload, our brain works with heuristics - mental shortcuts that help it make quick effortless decisions, which feel automatic and subconscious. It prefers System 1 thinking over System 2 thinking (Daniel Kahneman). Brands are System 1 triggers.
The Mental Model - The Forest Path
Think of brand building as creating a path through a dense forest. When you walk it for the first time, you have to hack through the bushes. It’s hard, takes conscious effort, and seems scary.
But every time you walk on the exact same path - the grass dies, the dirt packs down, and a recognizable pattern emerges. After a 1000 times, it becomes automatic, intuitive and safe.
Effortfully hacking the path is System 2. Walking the paved path with ease is System 1.
In marketing language, this is called mental availability (Byron Sharp - How Brands Grow). The moment someone hears the “tudum”, without any other input, they instantly know its Netflix. Coke doesn’t need to write its name to be identified - just the silhouette of the bottle is enough to make people recognise it. Coke and Netflix, by being consistent, have built highways through the dense forest. The “tudum” and the bottle shape are their Distinctive Brand Assets (DBAs).
Building DBAs, very simply put, is like finding your route in the forest, and walking it everyday to turn it into a highway - basically, consistently using your unique brand assets to build strong memory structures so that your audience can identify your brand with zero effort.
Not everything that is consistent is a DBA
But not all assets are paving stones. Some are just decor. Netflix logo is always red - but do people think of Netflix when they see red? Not really. But the color 1837 Blue triggers people to think of Tiffany’s, so much so that the color has officially been named “Tiffany Blue”. Despite Telegram being super consistent with their logo, the visual of the paper plane doesn’t remind people of the brand.
So, how do you know which elements are your DBAs and which are not? Big brands, like some that we referred to earlier, spend between $50,000 to $150,000 to answer this question. This requires testing multiple assets (logos, colors, fonts, characters, slogans, sounds etc) against a large representative sample of category buyers (often between 300 and 1000+ per market) and sometimes partnering with specialised agencies. Understandably, not every business can afford this. But there is a quick and dirty way.
Uniqueness X Fame
At the core of the expensive DBA researches is a simple framework:
X-Axis: Uniqueness - When people see it, do they know it’s only you?
Y-Axis: Fame - How many people have seen it?
Uniqueness X Frame framework
This gives us 4 quadrants:
Low Unique X High Fame - This is the color blue in the AMEX logo (Citi, Chase, Amex - they all use the same color), and the paper plane in Telegram (generic visual for “send” in emails. They are not unique to them. A large number of tech companies use blue colour - hence no one owns it. These are traps
High Unique X Low Fame - Your weird mascot. Your specific sound. Its uniquely yours, but not many people know about it yet. These are treasures - invest in them. Netflix’s “tudum” started as this
High Unique X High Fame - This is your highway in the forest. DO NOT CHANGE THESE
What you can do this week?
The quick and dirty alternative to the big expensive research is to try to replicate it at a tiny level. You need a printer, and a pair of scissors.
De-brand your assets. Print out your assets (logo, color block, mascot, font, anything else?) on separate cards / pieces of paper. Remove the brand name
Mix them in with 3 competitor assets. Eg. your blue square vs. their blue square
Show them to 10 customers / friends who don’t work in marketing. FLash each card for just 2 second
Ask two questions:
Have you seen this before? - Fame. If they say they don’t know, it’s low fame.
Who does this belong to? - Uniqueness. If they say it looks like competitors, its low uniqueness.
If they say “that’s obviously you” - you found a potential highway. The output will not be perfect - but it would be better than nothing.
PS: Fun question - what other reasons (err, excuses) have you heard marketers give not being consistent with their DBAs? Reply back! The most innovative excuse wins…extra love ;-)
Cheers.
Sumeshwer
Next week:
But what about startups, or new brands? Does this mean they are not allowed to experiment or pivot? What if nothing scores high on uniqueness? I’ll share a mental model for that next week.
