Building Distinctive Brand Assets
How does your brand grab attention?
Does you stick in the minds of your prospects?
Are your brand assets ‘nice enough’ or truly distinctive?
Distinctiveness is your strategic approach to the elements of your brand.
Done well, brand assets can become prominent mental cues for your audience. They work together to build recognition for your brand which should always be goal number one.
The greater quantity and quality of these assets, the higher likelihood your brand will be noticed, recognized, and chosen.
Brand assets cover a broad range of territory. Logos, slogans, mascots, imagery, color, product, voice, and more. Let’s look at some of the most commonly used to see how you can use them to build distinctiveness and ultimately a competitive advantage.
Logo:
Does your logo help your audience “get you” at a glance?
Is your logo a shortcut to a distinctive story of customer transformation?
Color:
What are the primary brand colors used among the competition?
Does your brand work to “own” a singular color?
Does your brand (mistakenly) use a broad set of colors to categorize service offerings?
Typography:
What tonality does your typography convey? Is it the right tonality?
How could type be used to convey your unique brand promise?
Imagery:
Does everyone in your industry use the same or similar images?
Are you able to invest in custom photography?
If not, could you develop a distinctive approach to stock images through composition, cropping, or color grading?
Visual language:
Do you use textures, patterns, illustrations, or set of compositions to create distinctiveness?
Does this visual language aid and enhance your brand promise?
Voice:
Does your brand have a unique tone of voice?
If the headline of your website was used by a competitor, would anyone notice?
Be distinctive everywhere.
Multinational market research firm JKR recently released a study of over 523 brands and more than 5,000 brand assets. Their focus: distinctiveness.
Of all the brand assets the studied, only 15% were truly distinctive. This means of the $4.7 trillion spent on marketing every year, a good deal was spent on assets that did not create a deeper mental connection with the audience.
“Showing up to the market as your unique and unmistakeable self isn’t just a matter of creative strategy. It’s vital to commercial survival and success.”
Your brand’s strategy has the greatest potential to impact revenue, margin, and growth. Chase it—it will reward you.
Three ways I can help
Brand Strategy: Build your brand holistically to create favorability with your target market.
Brand Identity: Confidently market, internally and externally, with a toolbox of visual and verbal assets that make your brand distinct.
Brand Marketing: Establish a distinct relationship with your current and future customers.
