To build brand equity it is considered desirable to have some unique image associations.  This is when your brand is the only one associated with an attribute.  However across 130 brands in 13 product & service categories we find that consumers rarely solely associate an image attribute with one brand in the category, and when they do they seldom agree with one another.  Consumers are much more likely to either associate multiple brands with an attribute, or no brands.  Further while large share brands are slightly more likely to get unique associations this turns out to be just one of a facts of being a large share brand, they get more of all types of brand associations

This suggests that unique associations – unless linked to a legally protected quality – are at best only temporary gains quickly lost once competitors copy.  Therefore, we question uniqueness as a long term brand equity objective, and do not think marketers should be judged on this criteria.  Further there is a danger that trying to find unique qualities to promote distracts marketers, leading them to concentrate on areas of little concern to consumers (see also Barwise and Meehan, 2004).

Attributes that are commonly used by buyers in choice situations are likely to be shared with competitors.  So to compete successfully the  link between the brand and the attribute needs to be strong for as many consumers as possible.  This means the greatest gains can be made by improving the quality of marketing communications to keep the brand salient for all relevant attributes.

Rather than focus on a unique message, we would suggest building brand distinctive qualities.  These devices (e.g. colour, logo or music), while not directly why consumers develop preferences for the brand, help clearly identify who is advertising.  Having a distinctive brand, coupled with a message centred around commonly used attributes, attention grabbing creative and an effective media strategy, will enhance the brand’s propensity to be retrieved in buying situations.  This will give the brand the best chance of being bought.

Being Unique

This report quantifies the extent to which consumers hold unique associations about brands.  By unique, we mean they associate only one brand with a specific attribute.

From a memory perspective, when a unique association is used as a recall cue in buying situations only one single brand fulfills the requirement.  For example, thinking that only Apple computers are stylish means that in a choice situation where being stylish is important, Apple is the only brand that will be thought of.  Uniqueness is considered a key component of brand equity, in that a brand with unique associations offers (or stands for) something that competitors do not.  Therefore, that brand may enjoy higher consumer loyalty and/or charge a price premium (Carpenter et al 1994).  Common features are thought to be of less value to consumers as they don’t discriminate between brands.  Therefore they don’t make choice easier (Tversky 1972).

In 1960, copywriter Rosser Reeves invented the ‘unique selling proposition’ (USP) for Colgate toothpaste –“Cleans your breath while it cleans your teeth” (Rossiter, 2005).  The aim of this USP was to create unique associations between Colgate and fresh breath.  While it is generally acknowledged that USPs are difficult to find, this does not stop marketers and researchers looking for them, lamenting not having them, and rejecting advertising concepts that do not contain something close to a USP. 

Research Questions

Using associations that are typically involved in brand health/equity measures, we examined:

1. How common is it for people to associate only one brand, and no others, with an attribute e.g. only Bank of America has ‘leading edge technology’.
2. Do unique associations make up a larger proportion of the brand knowledge of larger share brands, such that this higher uniqueness could explain the better brand performance?

Research Method

We analysed brand health/tracking studies in 13 markets.  Eight product categories were from Young and Rubicam’s Brand Asset Valuator (BAV) including food, beverages and durables.  The remaining came from service, retail and business-to-business markets, across several countries.  The brand attribute lists were derived from a variety of sources including qualitative research, expert opinion and past quantitative research.  Data were collected by either self-completion or telephone.  So these studies represent a wide cross section of markets, attributes and research approaches.  Sample sizes in each market were 300+ and the respondents were screened to ensure they bought from the category.

Participants were given a list of brands and associations and were asked to indicate which brands they associated with the attributes.  Respondents could mention as few or as many brands as they liked.  The attributes were those that are part of the product/service offering (e.g. good value), rather than elements such as colour or package shape (e.g. the red can of Coca-cola).  We were seeking to detect unique associations with meaningful attributes in line with the brand equity literature.

Analysis Approach

For each attribute, we identified how many people stated they perceived only one brand was linked to that attribute.  E.g., for ‘healthy’ in Soups, we identified how many people said that only Heinz was ‘healthy’, not mentioning any other brand with that attribute.  Then we identified how many people said solely Dolmio was ‘healthy’ and so on.

We also calculated the number who said multiple brands were healthy (e.g. both Heinz and Dolmio) and those who did not indicate any brand was ‘healthy’.  For example in Table 1, 6% of the market solely linked Heinz with being ‘healthy’; 2% solely associated Dolmio with ‘healthy’ and so on.  The total (association uniqueness) is the total across all brands (e.g. 19% of consumers said that a brand, any brand, was uniquely healthy), which can be compared to the proportion who associated healthy with multiple brands (80%).  When Healthy is the cue, 19% will only think of one brand – for 6% this will be Heinz, for 2% it will be Dolmio and so on.  For 80% multiple brands will compete for retrieval.

For all brands and in all markets (see Table 2) we found unique associations were unusual.  Typically associations were associated with either multiple brands in the market, or none.  On average, one in five people uniquely associated an attribute with any brand, but this was spread over multiple (up to 20) brands in the market.  The average level of uniqueness for a single brand on a single attribute was 3%.  People giving multiple brands far outweigh those giving only one. 

What About Large Share Brands?

The difference between the larger and the smaller share brands within each market was slight.  Large share brands had 22% of their brand associations unique compared to 19% for smaller brands.  This small difference can be explained by more solely loyal brand users that big brands have in their customer base.  These light category buyers typically know little about brands and therefore are more likely to only mention one brand.  This makes the brand associations of larger share brands consist of slightly more unique associations.  A difference which looks especially small in contrast to the often 30 fold difference in market share between large and small share brands.

Market Differences

To determine market uniqueness (see column 4, table 2), we divided the total number of unique associations gained by every brand in the market by the total number of associations (unique or otherwise) for that market.  We found the differences between markets are much greater than differences between brands.  This market level differentiation appears to be related to the number of brands in the market.  Markets with fewer brands generate more unique associations than markets with multiple brands.  We might have expected that more brands result in greater differentiation, as brands strive to offer a point of difference in a more competitive market.  However unique associations are lower when there are more brands because it is more likely that brand offerings will overlap with others.  This supports Sharp and Dawes (2001) who argue that while some markets are more differentiated than other markets, the brands within a competitive market have similar degrees of differentiation.

Brand Specific Deviations

We did see some instances where brands had noticeably higher levels of uniqueness for certain attributes.  The main themes around associations with high levels of uniqueness were:

• (a) Associations that represented real functional differences (e.g. a location of origin specific to only one brand).  For example, BankWest and ‘helps the western states’.  These are not qualities that can be copied or offered by other brands.
• (b) Specific descriptive associations linked to the largest brand in the market (e.g. Lucozade and ‘energetic’ and ‘best brand’).  This is again due to the higher number of solely loyal/light buyers that very large brands have.

These results extend knowledge from our last report on differentiation (report #17).  People do not see the brands they buy as very different from other brands in the marketplace.  Associations likely to be important and relevant to consumers are likely to be applicable to multiple brands. 

There is now much more choice available. For example, in the early 1970s consumers had the choice of two Colgate toothpastes whereas now this number is around 20 (Trout, 2000).  KFC menu items have increased from seven to 14 choices, breakfast cereals from 160 to 340.  Perhaps due to the explosion of brands in the market, having genuinely unique qualities is now rare. 

All brands offer something similar to buyers, that is why they compete with each other.  Unique initiatives that are successful (and even sometimes those that are not) are quickly copied, thereby no longer being unique to one brand.  There are typically more differences within a brand’s product range than there are between brands (report #17).  Searching for areas of potential uniqueness to position upon can run the risk of focusing on something of little interest to buyers.  The overall aim of marketing therefore is not to be thought of as different but rather to be thought of and noticed more frequently and by more people.  Opportunities to be recalled become limited if a marketer chooses to try and offer something unique.

Brands still need to stand out from the crowd, but in the sense they need to be distinctive (yellow arches, red can) and easily identified rather than differentiated.  In upcoming reports we will explore distinctiveness further and how to identify and measure it.

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