Why Distinctive Brand Assets Are Key to Brand Success
Distinctive branding is what makes a brand recognizable, memorable, and attractive to customers. Such big companies as Nike or Apple come to mind due to the most fascinating combinations of colors, fonts, images, and emotions they provoke.
If you are still considering whether it is worth spending costs on your brand’s promotion, you should stop it and start acting. Your competitors will do their best to make their brands better. So why don’t you try to beat them on this field and get the edge on them?
The ability to trigger useful associations in your customers’ minds is an indicator of absolute success of your distinctive brand marketing and promotional campaigns. If you manage to clearly define and identify your brand’s assets, that will be a great benefit for your company. Try to maximize their effect on the brain of your customers, and you will make a huge advancement.
However, remember that the human brain is a complex system based on the network of associations. You cannot control all of them. They involve such factors as the effectiveness of your competitors’ influence, the cultural cues, the present-day trends, and even the role of influencers in social media.
The primary objective of making your brand assets as distinctive as possible is turning them into powerful impact tools that can change the mental perception of your brand in your customers’ brains. Make your distinctive assets true triggers of the memory due to their attributes, tools, and associations. These marketing assets examples involve everything that can be associated with your company - its logo, slogan, packaging, music, images, and fonts. Colors play a great role in this mechanism, too.
Digital marketing has already brought too many brands to mind via magazines, commercials, TV shows, radio programs, and billboards. That results in the complete neglect of all advertisement mechanisms by most potential customers. They do not associate their well-being with the disappearance of brands anymore. Even if 97% of brands suddenly disappear, it will happen invisibly to most people. There is another interesting fact revealed by LinkedIn - almost half of consumers make mistakes in identifying brands and confuse them with competitors.
Therefore, this article is about how to make your brand assets as distinctive as possible. Let’s start with the benefits the distinctive brand assets can provide to the company.
Benefits
Everything that you use for promoting your brand and making it more successful is beneficial. However, there are the following benefits proper distinctive brand assets management can provide to their owner:
1. Increase in Recognition
When the brand is recognizable enough, you don't even need to mention its name. Everyone knows what kind of product or service they are going to receive with it. It happens due to the consolidation of the brand’s images with its definition in the mind of consumers. To understand how it works, remember the fact that distinctive assets work in the international market even without the use of any language. The sound or image predetermines the character of the overall perception.
2. Drawing Public Attention
People get countless inputs nowadays, so they easily forget the brands that come to being and then disappear. If the brand’s performance can boost the public attention, it means it uses its distinctive assets as often as possible. If you display only the company’s name in the ads, the public will not pay much attention to it among thousands others.
3. Brand Recall Becomes Easier
Distinctive assets of the company help it stand out in consumers’ minds for a long time. It can be a part from the soundtrack or the combination of colors in the logo. These features help bring the brand to mind and recollect everything associated with it. There may be opinions, emotions, perceptions, or any other pleasant experience connected with this brand and its services.
The positive emotions can be triggered by the recollection of taste, smell, visual images, and influences connected to emotions. If you hear the sound of Lego clicking, you will remember the cozy evenings at home when you were a child, and when you see the colors of MacDonald’s, you are sure to recollect your school friend’s birthday party. These distinctive brands produce associations that are built on your positive emotions that you would like to experience once again in the middle of your dull everyday routine.
4. Influence on the Decision to Buy
When you recollect something emotionally pleasant via the distinctive assets, your first impulse is to repeat these positive emotions and purchase the product once again. The associations work immediately if you want to drink or your old mobile has stopped working. First of all, you will think about Coca-Cola or Samsung if you have already had a positive experience with these brands.
When time comes to buy something, all the distinctive assets associated with the positive experiences emerge in your mind and help you make your buying decision at once.
5. Setting Relationships
Consumers find certain distinctive assets an indivisible part of their life. This positive connection sets close relationships between customers and brands. Such relationships may be long-lasting, and your company will gain many returning customers due to them. Your clients will be discussing your brand with other people, recommending it to them, making comments on the new ads and images you produce. Your logo may become a fascinating tattoo, and your simple jingle will sound as an unforgettable reunion song.
Keys to Distinctive Brand Assets in Digital Marketing
You need to start with the complex understanding of brand assets via semiotics, qualitative research, and neuroscience. That may sound too sophisticated. However, to be successful, you should know what impact brand assets may have on people’s minds. Semiotics embeds the cultural code and shows the essential components you need to involve to make your brand assets useful.
You can also think about measuring their strength with the help of reaction time (RT) testing, and it is the sphere of neuroscience. It demonstrates how strong the connections between the brand and its image are in people’s brains. We also need qualitative research to connect these two spheres in relation to the competitive context your brand assets function in. You need to know what your brand’s assets really mean to people and how they can interpret them. This understanding will help you to utilize your distinctive assets in the form that is the most effective at the moment. The memory structures triggered in the consumers’ minds will facilitate your brand recognition and form the ground for the creativity of your marketing team for the future campaigns.
Therefore, you need this research work for understanding how to effectively trigger your brand’s image in your potential customers’ brains with the help of associations. It means that every brand is what it is able to represent as a combination of its distinctive assets.
You need to understand what your client is looking for, what is important for them, and what assets to use to make your marketing as successful as possible. You may want to stick to your core or change your business’s image completely.
However, understanding the brand assets’ influence on people is essential in both cases. You can use them in developing your digital marketing strategy, while planning to use social networks, website ads, email marketing, or blogs. You will develop all the content based on this understanding, be it photos, videos, texts, or soundtracks.
Thus, if you want any of your new elements to become a distinctive asset of your company, think about its exclusivity and uniqueness to be easily differentiated from others and about its fame, meaning that it should be easily recognized by most people who see it and perceived as a representation of your brand.
In this way, you can create new distinctive assets for your marketing strategy by following these steps:
1. Make an Analysis of All Existing Distinctive Assets
Some elements can already be associated with your brand, so you can reuse them in your further campaigns. They may include your logo, slogan, colors, and fonts. You need to define whether these elements are really distinctive and associated with your brand only. To do that, according to the algorithm from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, you can:
survey the elements about their potential to become distinctive;
collect the data from interviews and surveys with the target audiences about their experience connected to your brand;
interpret the findings and identify the elements that are most useful in your communication with potential customers.
Based on the conclusion made after this research, you can identify which elements to ignore, and which ones to continue using and even reinforce.
2. Make Up Content Differentiators
Therefore, even if the element belongs to your brand’s marketing strategy, it does not mean that it is efficient as a distinctive asset. So, you need to develop your content strategy by picking out the assets that are mainly associated with your brand and its advantages. Remember that they need to be original and unique. In addition, they should be catchy. These elements should stick to people’s minds and associate with your brand only, even if the company’s name is not mentioned. These elements may include:
━ filters for Instagram stories;
━ original fonts in layouts;
━ specific sound themes for podcasts and videos;
━ characteristic expressions and mottos in the texts;
━ mentioning the partnership with prominent influencers;
━ developing interactive content to enhance engagement.
3. Combine These Assets with the Brand’s Essentials
You understand and have already formulated your goals and mission. The distinctive asset you have chosen should be aligned with your understanding and the company’s essence. All the assets should comply with your main principles, values, and individual characteristics of the brand. Your communication with potential customers should be clear and straightforward. For example, if your brand’s mission is serious, you cannot use jokes in the texts. Or, if one of your values is to protect women’s rights, you cannot use the help from the influencer with obviously sexist views.
4. Communicate with Consumers Consistently
Your distinctive assets need strong consolidation in your customers' minds. If you want to create an introductory song, use it everywhere, but not just in one YouTube video. Or it will not work properly if you use one color for Instagram and a completely different color pattern for Facebook. Your customers will not be able to associate your brand with these images, so they won’t serve as distinctive assets.
What Are Brand Assets?
Therefore, what is a brand asset? It is any marketing element that can associate with your brand in your potential consumers’ minds. Such elements can involve color patterns, logos, fonts, taglines, sounds, images, or anything else. These elements should be recognizable and engaging to people.
You need to develop a set of such distinctive assets but not use just one element. It will build unique associations with your brand and, if you are consistent in all your marketing campaigns, all these elements in a set will formulate your sole and original brand identity. The customers will remember it and make use of everything you will offer to them.
How to Make Distinctive Brand Assets
Here, we want to share some tips on how to make distinctive brand assets efficient.
Simplicity Is a Key
If you use a lot of different fonts or the whole palette of various colors, that will be overwhelming to your consumers’ perception. Pick out the core features not to distract people’s attention and confuse them. Your potential consumers will be happy to recognize your brand by a simple set of the most distinctive elements instead of a variety of them.
Brand Assets Should Feel Distinctive
These assets need to represent your business only but not anything else. Your creative marketing team can help you define what makes your business special and focus on that. It is called smart branding, and your assets will distinguish your company from the competitors, so consumers will remember it more easily.
High-Quality Visuals Are Essential
If your visuals are not professional enough, they will spoil the first impression. All images should be clear with high resolution, without pixelation, or fogginess. All the colors should be correct and clear. The quality of sizes also matters - the images should be consistent and correspond to the marketing purposes. Apply this principle to everything - graphics, product photos, illustrations, logos, and videos.
Consistency Is a Must
If you want to create a cohesive brand identity, be consistent in everything related to distinctive brand assets. The same fonts, colors, and logo structures should appear everywhere to demonstrate a unified marketing approach. You customers need to remember one concept and associate your company with it.
Types of Brand Assets
Brand assets can be of two types - physical and intangible ones. Physical brand assets include everything that the company has in its disposal - buildings, facilities, equipment, etc. Intangible assets are not material but they add a lot of value to the company. They are responsible for a positive reputation, reliability, and loyalty of clients.
For example, land, office furniture, computers and other office equipment, vehicles, and machinery are physical assets. Non-material assets involve reputation, industry recognition, community relations, trademarks, and customer loyalty that can be good brand asset examples. Therefore, distinctive brand assets are mostly intangible.
The Importance of Brand Asset Design
The design of the company’s brand assets is responsible for getting revenues. Your brand assets should be easily recognized and appreciated by all the target audiences and prospective customers. When you design the distinctive brand assets, consider the following:
━ the unique individuality of your brand;
━ your target market;
━ the budget capacity of your company;
━ the competitors and their progress;
━ the desired influence you want to have on your customers;
━ your material and non-material resources;
━ possible legal restrictions on your brand’s use;
━ brand assets availability and ease of use.
You need to have a well-developed and professionally designed strategy to create a truly iconic brand. Your marketing campaigns should be consistent and cohesive, as well as clear and straightforward. Your customers should recognize your company and its products easily, so developing your brand’s identity with the help of distinctive assets is an essential task.
Final Thoughts
Now, you know how well you need to consider the distinctive brand assets of your company to make it recognizable and well-appreciated among target audiences and prospective consumers. You can use all the tips provided here to make your brand iconic and prosperous.
Your business will surely be differentiated from your competitors, and the proper use of all the assets will help you build customer loyalty, increase the sales, and make a lot of progress in your industry.
