Why we care so much about Distinctive Brand Assets
My layman's understanding of advertising is that it mostly works by creating and refreshing memory structures. People notice our brand. It gets into their long term memories. And hopefully our brand gets retrieved first when they are thinking of buying from our category. All going well, we get bought (assuming we're available and easy to buy).
When it comes to advertising, the important bit is that the brand must get noticed. Not just the ad. The brand. This is a challenge, because people don't pay much attention to advertising. We glance at posters. We don't watch TV or video ads all the way to the end. Most attention to advertising is not actively watching or listening. It is more passive. And it is fleeting. Most folk are doing their best to avoid advertising. From what I understand, they are pretty good at filtering it out without much conscious thinking.
This is why our team care so much about Distinctive Brand Assets. I thank Byron Sharp, Jenni Romaniuk and their colleagues in The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for explaining the importance of Distinctive Brand Assets. Their books are essential reading and studying.
Today 71% of adults in Ireland can spontaneously link the below image to The National Lottery. This is without any logo or name. Note that there are no waterslides in this picture either:) This becomes very useful when we understand how little attention our social media ads get. We are lucky if people pay attention for more than 2 or 3 seconds. So we have a couple of seconds to get our brand into their long term memories. This is a tough task. But if our ads feature this imagery, we've a fighting chance that people will notice our brand before scrolling on.
In the past two years, we've created and maintained seven Distinctive Brand Assets, including the song Mr Blue Sky by ELO. We introduced this music as an asset in January, and already 62% of adults can associate it with us spontaneously. (Apologies to those who previously loved the song but are now sick of it).
Professor Karen Nelson-Field and the wonderful guys in RedC have done a lot of work on this with us. My colleague Stephen has written an article on WARC with some of our findings on attention in our ads. And the implications for how we plan.
Marketing Manager ROI B&Q; PRO Trim Drama Group
3yBrand assets are gold - both in the devising and selection and introduction and in the careful curation through all channels and across all messages - well done on your current campaign ☀️
Managing Director Paddy Power Online
3ySuper work as always Paul 👌
Great read, Paul. Also glad that you mentioned the importance of noticing the brand, not only the ad's visibility. Often there are great ads, leading to consumer confusion etc, due lack of understanding who is delivering the message. One thing to add would be for brands to steer away from placing brand elements to lower right corner, as they almost always are leading to lower brand engagement: https://www.neuronsinc.com/insights/avoid-the-corner-of-death by shown by various neuromarketing studies by Neurons
Partner at The Commercial Works
3yExcellent summary Paul. Seven DAs is quite a bit but great if they work for you. The challenge now is which to prioritise and for which piece of communication, channel.
Global Managing Partner at the brandgym
3yThis is great Paul. Couldn’t be any clearer.