Create a new distinctive asset for your brand
- May 25
- 10 min read
Most brands are one distinctive asset away from becoming far more memorable, so here’s one simple but significant thing you could do today that compounds for years to come.
If your brand only relies on a logo to be recognised, I could say you’re making it a little harder for customers to remember you. Though that’s a little unfair because a logo does help your brand stand out to be recognised and remembered. However many brands are sleeping on what could be a golden opportunity to increase their brand awareness and improve brand recognition with something that could easily be done today.
Because the brands that win usually aren’t the ones constantly reinventing themselves. They’re the ones repeatedly showing up with the same distinctive assets that customers start mentally associating with them over time. Be it a logo, a mascot, colours, packaging, sounds and other cues that create associations between your brand and what a customer remembers.
And the best part?
This is one of the easiest quick wins almost any brand can start implementing today.
Create one new distinctive brand asset.
Then combine it consistently with at least two others your brand already owns.
Because the more recognisable memory structures attached to your brand, the easier your business becomes to remember, recall and choose when you can create a variety of distinctive assets to help your brand win.
So what can you do to give your brand a shot a better business success with a new distinctive asset?
Most brands are forgettable because they only rely on a logo
The most common request a branding person or graphic designer will receive is “can you design me a logo?”. Yeah, every business needs a logo, just the same as they need a registered business number and trading name. It’s the stamp we use to say, “Hey, this is ours” so we discern one brand from another.
Hell, some people rely on a logo more than the actual name of the business to recognise a business. This is just the same as understanding what a STOP sign means when STOP is written in a language that is foreign to you. So they can be visual symbols that create quick associations between company and customer.
But this is often where the conversation ends. Just a logo. It’s all we need, surely? Not quite.
For some businesses a logo alone can suffice, but for the most part businesses have incredibly easy opportunities that go begging to do more than a logo to get attention and get people to remember a brand for more than just the name and logo that goes with it.
The problem here is that a logo alone may not be enough to form those associations, especially when generic or stereotypical of a particular industry symbols are used, that brand blends into other memory associations people have. This is why distinctiveness is key, especially if it remains simple and not overly complex, like the shape of an apple, or an archery target, or a yellow uppercase M serve as effective symbols that hold those associations we have of brands like Apple, Target and McDonald’s.
And you might think, well, Apple, Target and McDonald’s have such distinctive logos, why would they need anything else? That’s true of a multi-billion dollar international companies today, but they weren’t always that widely recognised and known. All three of those brands have used additional assets over the years to increase the effectiveness of their logo and the overall associations we have with their brands.
Now a logo is an effective tool in your brand toolkit, but another reason we want to go beyond a logo is that our logo isn’t always the first thing that is seen, that is to say if it is even seen at all for it to still be recognised. This applies of course to those with vision impairments who obviously won’t be able see your brand at all, which is where other sensory cues should be considered like sounds and messaging. While others may struggle to recognise your logo with enough clarity, and something like a strong distinctive colour or two, when in context, can help discern your brand…even for those without impairments colour is the first thing we visually recognise before symbols and words and yet many brands don’t use colour to help customers recognise their brands quicker in a potential sea of competitors and visual noise from other brands.
One final reason to stick a fork in this rationale for putting in the effort to go beyond just a logo, is that there are several ways to condition a customer to like your offer better than a competitor, simply because of the way your product or service presents itself. If it vibes with them. If it’s aesthetically pleasing to them. If it aligns with their expectations. For most brands it takes a whole lot more than a logo to communicate something that creates a level of interest, especially an irrational one that goes beyond features, benefits and price, to give someone confidence that your brand is the one for them. Many customers buy the one that looks the nicest, sounds the nicest, has a design to it that aligns with what they want to be seen with. While many buy the ones that simply stand out on the shelf the most, and it’s usually not because the logo is bigger, but because it’s brighter, larger, more colourful or using a colour that differs from others around it, or it has a different shape.
Distinctive brand assets are what build mental availability
In branding and marketing circles, we call these sensory cues distinctive brand assets. You could call them brand codes, a brand identity, design style, look and feel, whatever. And we use them, as the name suggests on the bottle, to create a level of discernible distinctiveness to essentially make it a bit easier for a customer to spot your brand in a crowd and also tell your brand and a competitor brand apart, especially if your offer is not much different from a competitor.
The other advantage of developing distinctive assets is that they build what's now called 'mental availability'. It's a jargon term for salience or coming to mind when needed. And these assets help build those memory structures customers have so that what they remember about a brand can be instilled in something as recognisable as a distinctive brand asset.
You’ll no doubt have experienced some, if not all of these types of distinctive assets out there in the market that brands show up with.
They can be:
Colours
Fonts
Tagline/slogans and other brand messaging
Mascots
Shapes
Sounds - known as sonic branding: music, jingles, beeps and boops.
Packaging
Clothing
Merchandise
Photography/Videography style
Patterns
Textures
Tone of voice
Smells
They all work as vessels that can be filled with these associations a customer has when they experience them or think of your brand. It’s not to say you need to have them all, but the more layers you do have to how your brand shows up, the higher the chances are that you’re making it easier for your customers to recognise, remember, think about, and find your brand.
It just takes a bit of effort to add a few more into your brand toolkit to help your brand win, but also make it an effective experience for your customers.
To give you a bit of an idea of how others are doing this well, here are 3 brands with more distinctive assets than most brands in their category:
Ray White is a national real estate brand in Australia and their logo is nothing unique as it’s simply a bold italicised font that makes their ‘wordmark’ logo on a yellow square. However, they are just about the only nationally present real estate agency that go beyond a logo or a distinct colour to help their agency stand out and be remembered with distinctive assets. The first is a classic colonial style wooden door on their offices that is painted in their bright yellow brand colour. So that you enter their agency through a door that feel like a home but with a distinct quality that catches your eye as you travel past it. The other, again yellow of course, is a vintage bicycle that sits in the reception area of their agency offices. Out of all the agencies to often choose from, Ray White uses these distinctive assets to create strong associations for their brand to be remembered when needed but also communicate a homely feeling their customers can experience.
Another example are the 5 notes on a keyboard to play the McDonald’s “ba da ba ba ba” audio jingle that has been reduced down from their “I’m lovin’ it” full music jingle, and now messaging slogan. McDonald’s also has their lasting mascots, Ronald, Grimace, Hamburgler and Birdie. They have their distinct red french fries packaging that is even an emoji now. And many years ago when they first started opening up franchise stores, their golden arches logo were inspired by the curved architectural beams either side of their stores that made their restaurants very distinct as you drove past...which has now translated into the massive golden arches M logo that are raised up high above their stores as a beacon.
And how about for the third example I throw my own hat in the ring with my G’day Frank brand to show I at least walk the walk. Though funnily enough I don’t use a hat as a distinctive asset. What I do instead is paint the town red...or should I say, pink, with my hot pink brand colour. I have pink rim reading glasses. A pink hoodie. Pink medical scrubs for my Doctor Branding podcast. I paint my two thumbnails with pink nail polish. I even custom painted a pair of Nike Air Jordan 1 sneakers to white, black and pink of course. And I have a litany of pink items around my office that make me look like a bower bird but instead of blue, I’m collecting things that are hot pink. So things like pink water bottles, microphone covers, cups, pencil tins, headphones, stools, pens and more. I do this to 100% stand out as pink is one of those colours in the spectrum of light, like yellow, orange and red that catch our attention first…it’s why they are used for highlighters, hazard signs, and worksites that require hi-vis clothing. I know this has been effective because I often get messages from people that say they thought of me when they saw something hot pink that wasn’t even mine.
What I also try to make a point of is use consistent brand language repetitively, like “Say g’day today” or “give your brand a shot” or “better branding for better business success”, so that it becomes another cue to remember and recognise the language I use and form those associations to get in touch and think about better branding for your business.
To extend that point about consistency and repetitiveness, it’s what every distinctive asset requires to actually be effective. As there’s no point just showing up with it for a short period of time, even if it was a whole year. It requires time to build these associations with the things your customers see, hear, touch and experience. So the more you use them, the better they’ll be at enhancing your brand presence to actually be effective.
Here’s my challenge to your brand
Come up with a new distinctive brand asset today. I mean, it might take you a little more than a day to figure it out or implement it. But think of and decide on something you could add to your brand that will help it stand out and make it easy for your customers. It could be inspired by another brand in another category if you’re short on ideas, but there will be something you can quite easily do to add another layer on top of your brand to create that distinctiveness that sets your brand apart.
The next step is obviously to implement it. It might compliment other things you already have so as to enhance certain touchpoints like your website, social media content or ads. But get it out there and make it obvious enough to notice.
Once you’ve got it out there in the open, keep it there. For months and months and months. Year after year. The trouble with most brands is that they drop off after a while as managing consistency in your brand can be hard work. It’s not difficult per se, but it is constantly reminding yourself and/or your team to ensure all the brand asset boxes are ticked.
The other part of it is that you inevitably get over doing it and you get a bit sick of seeing those assets, showing up with them or saying them. Most brands fall into that trap, even after 3-6months of repetitiveness, it’s just inherent human behaviour. But the point is that the brand is for your customers to connect with. They will never experience your brand as much as you do as the brand custodian. So it’s perfectly fine to feel that way, but persevering through it, because I know full well that it becomes tedious or monotonous to do so. Your job is to show up like a doctor with a stethoscope around your neck, it’s what you need to do to succeed as a brand (not just another business) that people think of, look for and want to buy instead of a competitor. As one new asset today could be that extra feather in your cap that gets a customer over the line.
Most brands don’t need a complete rebrand to improve effectiveness but that’s often the default to make their brand stand out if it’s lacking. So too is a brand just starting out where a logo is just another tick box of startup culture, when there’s every opportunity to do more as early as possible to start the groundwork needed to catch up to the rest of the market and stand out.
Brands today could enhance the power of their brands simply by creating more recognisable memory structures working together consistently. And the big point I've left to last is that most businesses aren’t doing this, all the while potential customers out there don’t always choose the best option, they choose the one they are most aware of and think of. Which means to stand out from your competitors with a new distinctive asset could be the easiest thing you could do to help your brand win. Especially when there is this distinctive brand assets paradox (shown below) that shows that out of all types of distinctive brand assets, the most used, being logos and brand colours are the least effective, while those that are least used have the most effectiveness for brand recognition that creates mental availability.
So instead of redesigning your logo again, create one new distinctive brand asset this week. Combine it with what you have already. Repeat it with relentless consistency.
Because brands grow when people remember them, can find them and give them more reason to buy than price, features and benefits. Do this you’ll be giving your brand a shot with better branding for better business success.
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