Brands need distinctive assets
LONDON/ADELAIDE: Brands relying on the quality of their content to get noticed may be neglecting the significant marketing opportunities offered by having a set of distinctive assets, according to Jenni Romaniuk.
Writing in the current issue of Admap, the associate director of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science likens the strategy of getting attention first then branding second to using darts to tackle a swarm of wasps: “you might hit a few, but you will miss the majority.”
Further, “The more attention-grabbing the creative, the harder the branding has to work to succeed,” she notes.
One way of creating branding that cuts through the environmental distractions external to the advertisement, including mental clutter, is to deploy “distinctive assets”.
These can be anything sensory, although in the world of advertising and media they are inevitably focused on visual and audio assets.
Included in the visual category, for example, are sub-groups of different asset types – shapes, colours, faces, words, fonts, moments – each of which has qualities that make it distinct from other asset types and which can be leveraged to a brand’s advantage, Romaniuk explains.
But rather than looking at these in isolation, she advises thinking of them “as part of a larger palette or menu of branding options” which can be drawn upon to strengthen branding in particular contexts.
“The key thing is to remember the simple principle of contrast,” she states. “If you want the branding to stand out, choose and execute for contrast against the visual and audio environment in which it is placed.”
Doing so successfully, however, will require a proper understanding of the existing strengths of a brand’s distinctive assets, in terms of both uniqueness and fame.
