The Role of Uniqueness
The purpose of building Distinctive Assets is to improve branding and provide a wider range of options to signal the brand in media and sales environments. For example, some McDonald’s advertisements contain no direct brand name, but instead favour Distinctive Assets such as the ‘Golden Arches’ and ‘I’m lovin’ it’ jingle. Similarly, other brands, such as Tide or Cadbury, use strong colour blocking to direct consumers to their brand in-store. Ideally, Distinctive Assets should be unique brand identifiers, otherwise your advertising and in-store displays may work for competitors.
This makes understanding the presence and strength of competitor links to the brand’s Distinctive Assets critical information when deciding which assets to prioritise for future use and/or development.
The Need to Prioritise
It is costly, both in time and financial resources, to build and maintain Distinctive Assets. Therefore a selection process is necessary to prioritise which assets to invest in.
There are many different types of Distinctive Assets to choose from, such as logos, fonts, colours, characters, taglines, jingles and packs. The aim is to have enough assets to mitigate the risk of relying on a single asset but avoid stretching resources by trying to build too many assets. Identifying assets with low Uniqueness (more competitor links) is an important part of narrowing down the list of potential assets.
This Research
We use Uniqueness results collected from 1,281 in-market assessments of Distinctive Assets from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute’s database. These assets come from 13 consumer packaged goods categories in 19 countries.
To compare across asset types, we adapt a measure of Competitive Intensity from economics (Herfindahl, 1950; Hirschman, 1945)1, to measure asset ownership. Whilst more typically used to assess market structure and the viability of company mergers, here we use the index to rate the intensity of competition for Distinctive Assets in consumer memory. This approach provides a single measure of ownership for each asset, rather than multiple Uniqueness scores for each individual brand linked to that asset. Therefore we can compare results both within asset types (e.g., a pack style in one category with a pack style in a different category) and across different asset types (e.g., pack styles with characters).
Calculating Competitive Intensity involves two steps:
Step 1: Calculate how unique the asset is at a brand level, namely which brands are linked to the asset and in what proportion.
Step 2: Calculate Competitive Intensity, to understand how intense the competitive sharing is overall, at the asset level.
Each asset type has an average Competitive Intensity, with significance testing used to identify differences between types. Table 1 provides a guide to interpreting the Competitive Intensity metric.
Table 1: Interpreting Competitive intensity as a measure of Asset Ownership
Results – Comparing Asset Types
Results reveal Characters (69%), Logos (61%), and Fonts (60%), have higher level of ownership than other Distinctive Asset types (but not each other).
Colour however, has the lowest level of ownership (31%), and is much lower than Characters, Logos and Fonts, as well as Product Forms (49%), and Pack Styles (48%), but its difference is not statistically significant from Images on Pack (41%), or Taglines (39%).
Figure 1: Average Asset Ownership levels across Asset Types
Results – Variation in the Ownership of Individual Assets
Individual assets of the same type vary widely in their ownership. It is useful to note that this variation trends in line with Competitive Intensity, indicating that asset types that have higher ownership on average, comprise individual assets that are more likely to be owned. More competitive types, such as colour, not only have a lower average but also greater variation in colour asset ownership levels.
So, while colour assets are least likely to be owned by a brand in a category, there are still instances of ‘success’ where individual colour assets are owned by a brand in the memory of its category buyers.
Indeed all asset types have successes (> 80% uniqueness) and asset failures (<50% uniqueness) (Figure 3). This implies that the unique ownership of a Distinctive Asset is not inherent to its type, but instead results from a combination of factors including things such as smart selection and quality of execution.
Figure 3: Percentage of Cases with High, Medium and Low Ownership
Key Implications
Of the asset types tested in this research:
- Characters, Logos and Fonts offer a higher probability of brand ownership
- Colour offers the lowest probability of brand ownership
- All asset types have ‘successes’ and ‘failures’. Asset ownership depends on more than simply type. Even for our best performing asset type (Characters) 30% of assets have very low ownership levels. Whilst 1 in 20 colour assets have high ownership levels, despite being our worst performing type.
Smart Selection
Smart asset selection is less about choosing the ideal asset, and more about avoiding mistakes. Critically, smart selection prevents investing in an asset that is already linked (or could be linked) to a competitor brand. Deliberately selecting, or actively “borrowing”, an asset from a competitor may be short-sighted, as any asset building activities risk evoking and refreshing that competitor brand. Prior to setting priorities, if you do not have the opportunity to measure competitor links to a proposed asset, we recommend a precursory audit of competitor brands to highlight potential cross-overs.
After ruling out assets with links to competitors, other criteria can help to prioritise any remaining potential assets. For example, consider the characteristics of the media or sales channel where the asset will be used, or the role it must play to add value compared to existing brand assets. In some cases there may be several options with potential into strong Distinctive Assets. Where this is true, it is important to make a decision, so marketing activities can be focused on building only one or two assets, and not ineffectively fragmented over several assets.
When it comes to developing a colour asset specifically, utilising combinations and/or colour based designs can mitigate the competitive challenges typical of individual colours. For example, Cillit Bang’s use of a pattern, or the grid/checkerboard used to distinguish between core Red Bull variants.
Good Quality Execution
It is not enough to select a promising asset, execution matters a lot. Simply presenting an asset on pack or in advertising is unlikely to be enough for category buyers to notice and learn those associations.
Some simple, but effective rules for good quality execution are:
Be prominent – Across both time and media/platforms. Category buyers will process more deeply what they can quickly notice.
Co-present with the brand name – The more distance between asset exposure and brand exposure, the harder it is to build the links between the two – so keep them as close as possible.
If you are struggling to build an asset, check these aspects of all your asset building activities to identify any execution weaknesses that are letting you down.
_____________________________________________________________________________
1 The Herfindahl-Hirschman Index, as utilised to measure economic market concentration: 
______________________________________________________________________________
