Distinctive brand assets: distinctive, not different

Origin

The idea sits inside the larger Ehrenberg-Bass argument that brands grow through penetration rather than loyalty [2], and it was given its own book by Jenni Romaniuk in 2018 [1].

The move it makes is to separate two words the trade uses interchangeably.

Differentiation is being meaningfully different on an attribute a buyer cares about. It is the thing positioning tries to achieve, and it is hard, expensive, and usually temporary.

Distinctiveness is being recognisable as yourself. A buyer sees a colour or hears three notes and knows who that is, in a second, without reading anything. Quality has nothing to do with it.

Romaniuk’s claim is that the second does most of the commercial work and gets a fraction of the attention, because it is unglamorous. Nobody wins an award for not changing the logo.

What the evidence shows

The evidence base is the Ehrenberg-Bass purchase data: how buyers actually behave across categories and decades, rather than what they say in a brand tracker [2].

Two findings carry the argument.

Buyers do not perceive much difference between brands. When asked to name what makes a brand different, most buyers of most brands either cannot, or name something the whole category offers. This holds even among a brand’s own customers.

Buyers recognise brands constantly and effortlessly. Recognition runs on colour, shape, logo, typeface, character, sound, tagline, layout. It works at speed, in low attention, from a fragment.

That gives the diagnostic its two axes.

Fame is the share of category buyers who link the asset to your brand when shown it on its own, with the name removed.

Uniqueness is whether those same buyers link it to you only, or also to somebody else in the category.

Plotting them separately produces four quadrants, and only one of them is an asset.

A real asset. High fame, high uniqueness. Protect it. Repeat it. Resist the annual urge to modernise it.

A shared cue. High fame, low uniqueness. Known, but it points at the category or at a competitor. Spending here builds somebody else’s recall. This is the quadrant that a single composite score hides, and it is the reason the two tests have to stay separate.

Noise. Low on both. Most of what a brand guidelines document contains.

Unbuilt. Low fame, high uniqueness. Genuinely yours, nobody links it to you yet. The only quadrant where new investment creates new value.

Fame

Shared cue

Known, but it points at the category or at a competitor too. Spend here builds somebody else's recall.

A real asset

High fame, high uniqueness. Protect it, repeat it, and resist the urge to modernise it.

Noise

Neither known nor owned. Most of what a brand guideline document contains.

Unbuilt

Genuinely yours, nobody links it to you yet. The only quadrant where investment makes new value.

highlowlowhighUniqueness

Fame

The share of category buyers who link the asset to your brand when they see or hear it on its own.

Uniqueness

Whether those same buyers link it to you only, or also to somebody else in the category.

Fame without uniqueness is a shared cue, and spending on it builds somebody else's recall. Only the unbuilt quadrant is where new investment creates new value.

Source: After Romaniuk, J., Building Distinctive Brand Assets, Oxford University Press, 2018. See also Sharp, B., How Brands Grow, 2010, and Ries and Trout, 1981, for the opposing case. Brave New Media.

The mechanism underneath recognition is not mysterious and is covered elsewhere in this section. Repeated exposure produces liking without argument or awareness [3]. Easier processing produces a judgement of quality that gets attributed to the object rather than to the ease [4]. Distinctive assets are a way of compounding both, deliberately, over years.

The challenge

This is the sharpest live disagreement in branding and it should not be flattened.

Ries and Trout’s position is that the contest happens in the buyer’s memory and is won by occupying a position a competitor has left open [5]. That tradition treats meaningful difference as the whole game. Romaniuk and Sharp read the purchase data and conclude that buyers do not hold brands apart the way the positioning tradition assumes.

The strongest version of the counter-argument is not that Ehrenberg-Bass is wrong about recognition. It is about scope. In considered, high-value, low frequency purchases, where a buyer builds a shortlist and compares, the claim that nobody perceives difference is much weaker. A company choosing an enterprise supplier is not behaving like a shopper reaching for a soft drink. Some of the evidence base is drawn from fast-moving consumer categories, and the extension to B2B is argued rather than demonstrated in every case.

The honest position, which the literature supports, is that both are doing work at different moments. Position for the few who are actively deciding. Be recognisable for the many who are not, which on any given day is almost everyone. See The 95-5 rule.

Where I see this go wrong

They measure assets with the name attached. If you show someone your logo next to your name and ask whether they recognise it, you have measured nothing. The test requires the name removed. Almost every in-house asset audit fails here.

They report one score. Fame and uniqueness collapse into a single “recognition” number, the shared cue quadrant disappears, and the brand keeps investing in a cue that is building the category.

They treat consistency as a creative constraint rather than as the asset. Every refresh of the palette and modernisation of the logo is a decision to spend accumulated recognition in exchange for something that looks current to the people who commissioned it. Sometimes that trade is right. It is almost never priced.

I have moved an agency across Europe and the Gulf, and the thing that travels worst is a brand built on explanation. A proposition that needs a paragraph needs that paragraph translated, re-argued and re-sold in every new market. A colour does not. Recognition is the part of a brand that crosses a border intact, which is an argument for distinctiveness that Romaniuk does not make and that I would put near the top of the list for anyone expanding.

What to do with it

1. List your candidate assets. Colour, shape, logo, typeface, character, sound, tagline, layout. Anything a buyer could use to identify you without reading your name.
2. Test each one with the name removed, among category buyers, not customers. Customers will recognise everything, which is why testing on them is comforting and useless.
3. Report fame and uniqueness as two numbers. Never one. If your research supplier gives you a composite, ask for the components.
4. Plot the four quadrants and act by quadrant. Protect real assets. Stop funding shared cues. Cut noise. Invest only in unbuilt.
5. Set a change threshold before anyone proposes a redesign: what would have to be true about the asset’s fame score to justify replacing it. Write it down while nobody is excited.
6. Put the surviving assets in front of the media plan, not the brand book. An asset that only appears in the guidelines is not an asset.
7. Re-test annually. Fame moves slowly, uniqueness moves when a competitor decides it wants your colour.

If you run the company rather than the marketing

This is the entry on this list most likely to save you money, because the decision it governs is one you will personally be asked to approve.

Every few years someone will bring you a rebrand. The case will be that the identity looks dated, that it does not reflect where the business is going, and that competitors have moved on. All three may be true. None of them is the question.

The question is what the existing assets are worth, and almost nobody arrives with that number. Ask for it before you look at a single design route: which of our cues do category buyers link to us, with the name removed, and do they link them to anybody else. That is a half-day exercise and it is cheap.

If the answer is that the colour or the shape has real fame and real uniqueness, then a refresh is not a modernisation, it is a write-off of an asset you already own, and the cost of rebuilding it is years rather than quarters. If the answer is that nothing is linked to you at all, the rebrand is fine and the real problem is that you have never been consistent long enough for anything to stick.

Either way you have turned a taste argument into a commercial one, which is the only version of that meeting worth having.