“Marketing science” is a strange little sub-segment of the global marketing industry.

The term “science” might evoke visuals of white-coat lab assistants playing around with excel formulas to perfect A/B testing of YouTube ads. That might not be too far from the reality.

But one of the most prevalent and useful outcomes from the obsession with marketing science over the last decade is the concept of “distinctive brand assets”.

This article is an attempt at providing a practical guide on how to actually implement some marketing science. I’m calling it…

Maybe you’ve heard this term before. Perhaps you’ve read “How Brands Grow” a few years back or you occasionally chime in to a podcast where they talk about “distinctiveness”.

I’ll admit - I’m guilty of pushing this marketing science propaganda into the world as well.

But it occurred to me recently, that most people are not very deep into this space. If you’re running a brand, you don’t have time to study “evidence based marketing principles” - you just want to do stuff that works and makes an impact.

So the purpose of today’s newsletter is to give you a simple, practical and straightforward breakdown of my favourite “marketing science” principle - distinctive brand assets.

Let’s go!

OK so what the f are distinctive assets?

In simple terms - something is a “distinctive asset” for the brand if it can cue the brand’s name in someone’s mind without saying the brand’s name. For example, the triangle shape and yellow colour of chocolate packaging. The words “gives me wiiings”. The “ta-dum” sound when you open your favourite streaming app.

I bet each of these brief explanations trigger the name of a brand in your head.

It’s basically just another way to quantify branding. Branding can often get lumped into simply thinking about colours or logos, without much regard for the consumers interpretation of branding beyond the initial exposure.

The idea of distinctive assets goes a step further in 2 ways:



1. It extends beyond just typical “branding” and includes things like packaging shapes and characters from ads.
   
   and
   

2. There is a way to measure the value and equity of these elements.
   
   Let’s jump into these two points in more detail.

Brand assets can be more than just your logo or key colours

As marketers, we can be a little bit obsessed with change. Often, the solution to our growth problems is something new - a new ad campaign, a new tagline, a new product.

Here’s a little thought experiment for you:

You are now banned from changing anything about your brand for the next 5 years. How do you approach your job?
You would probably go through in meticulous detail every single element you’ve ever developed. You’d look to squeeze every little bit of equity out of the stuff you’ve already got, and try to replicate it everywhere possible with utmost consistency.

Here’s a list of brand assets you might look into to see if you can pull anything old back into the mix: 



Visuals

Logos, primary, secondary and tertiary colours, icons, design styles, typography, shapes, textures in printed materials, packaging shapes and formats, packaging design elements - basically anything you can see the cues your brand. 


Auditory cues

Jingles, phrases, specific sounds, music tracks, unique voices, auditory logos, product sounds - anything that could be vaguely associated with your brand that you can hear. 


Words

Taglines, website headlines, ad headlines, phrases and unique terms, product names. Any form of written language that could link to your brand.

Faces

Real people who represent your brand, the founders, employers, influencers, ambassadors Fictional characters from ads or social media or your website or marketing materials. Anything that has a face and might have represented your brand in someone’s mind at some point.

This is a useful exercise for you - dive into the archive files of past work, document the categories above and do a little stocktake of your brand assets of its lifetime.

Now, how do we define ‘distinctiveness’ - are these assets useful to us?

This is where the real “marketing science” work begins to shine. Rather than simply guessing if these assets have any equity in them, we can test to find out. Think of it like filtering all your assets through a sieve. Only the pure, valuable stuff will come through and you can chuck out the rest.

And it’s simpler than you think.

I like to think about distinctive assets with a philosophical metaphor. 
If a tree falls in the forest but no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? 

Well it turns out, brand assets are kind of the same.

If we’ve used a tagline inconsistently and we’re considering changing it, we should think about whether people are actually familiar with this tagline and if they link it to our brand. 

After all, just because you’ve written something, doesn’t mean it’s been read, and just because it was read, doesn’t mean it was remembered.

So how do we test these assets?

In simple terms, we go and ask people.

For our tagline example, we want to go and ask 1,000 people one simple question: 
in the category of x, what brand does this tagline belong to?

This gives us two important metrics - fame and uniqueness.
Fame is the percentage of people who associate the tagline with our brand.
Uniqueness is the percentage of people who associate the tagline with another brand. 

If you do this testing with the assets you think are most important for your brand, you’ll probably get a good reality check on how prevalent your brand assets really are. 

Let’s go back to our thought experiment.

After testing your assets, you will have completely broken your frame. Everything you thought you knew about what people remembered about your brand is shattered and you are faced with the harsh reality that people are forgetful and marketing is about consistency and repetition.

But the good news is that your job is very clear now. You no longer have to create anything new - you just need to focus on training people to learn the stuff you already have.

Now - a few caveats. Everything discussed here is my interpretation of the work of the Ehrenberg Bass Institute - primarily the work of Byron Sharp, Jenni Romaniuk and the teams behind them. I’m a simple minded person, my marketing degree is 15 years old and I am by no means a marketing scientist- just a practitioner looking for an edge for the brands I work with. So whilst I put a lot of effort to ensure the accuracy and relevance of this information, I always suggest you read the original work yourself. 

What did you think of this style of article? 

It’s a slight departure from grocery brand style content but I think it is foundational information to be successful in grocery. And like I said, I enjoy spreading the propaganda.