How To Ensure Distinctive Assets Don't Become A Liability
The term ‘distinctive brand assets’ seems to have become very fashionable in marketing departments and advertising agencies over the past decade. Even just saying the words makes you feel kind of smart. Sometimes in meetings when it comes to briefing or reviewing creative ideas it can seem like there is a rush to be the first one to bring up the topic.
Perhaps the appeal lies in the fact that it's one of the rare times when we as marketers get to apply a phrase that sounds like a financial or accounting term. If you really want to impress you might even drop in a quote or two from Ehrenberg-Bass or talk about ‘nudging memory structures’ and ‘mental availability’. It all sounds technical, scientific and accountable, all of which can be rare indeed in the intuitive, gut-feel world of branding.
This is not to say the buzz around distinctive brand assets isn’t entirely merited. It’s a significant contribution to thinking about what makes brand communication effective and every successful brand has at least some distinctive assets that it deploys in its marketing and customer experience. Countless brands have ridden on the back of powerful distinctive assets to create rivers of revenue gold. From Mortein’s ‘Louie The Fly’, to M&M’s use of their colourful characters, to Nike’s use of Michael Jordan and to the ongoing Peroni Girl campaign, you don’t have to look far in the brand landscape to find great success stories involving such assets.
Inherent within the approach of distinctive assets is the recognition that brands need to find their way into long term memory if they are to maximise their influence on consumer behaviour. This perspective is to be applauded and certainly isn’t something that can be taken for granted when you consider how brands are often promoted in today’s increasingly short-term, digitally driven marketing environment.
But I can’t help wondering if another reason behind the popularity of distinctive brand assets is that it reduces uncertainty, risk and anxiety. If people can just fill their brand communication with a set of approved and agreed distinctive assets that have been used before they don’t really have to take responsibility if something underperforms in market. Distinctive assets can be a convenient and easy ‘opt-out’ from change and the hard strategic decisions that often go with it.
The theory even has an economic angle to appeal to CFOs. The repetition of familiar icons, imagery, characters and music allows for the formation of consistent and stable memories in the minds of consumers. These stable memory structures don’t need to be re-created over and over with expensive sixty second television commercials. Over time they can be cost-effectively topped up with much shorter bursts of activity in television, online or even outdoor. Distinctive brand assets suddenly feel even more attractive when talked about in this fiscally responsible way.
Perhaps not surprisingly brands have gone to extraordinary lengths to preserve distinctive assets. VB created voiceovers for its familiar ‘Hard Earned Thirst’ television ads using computer generated audio of the voice of John Meillon long after he died. Avis has been running with its famous “We Try Harder” end line for over half a century. And there was a time when Qantas had to reassemble the Australian Children’s Choir every time it wanted to plug the brand on television. But should distinctive assets be pursued at all costs?
Distinctive assets are a powerful tool, but their application needs to be thought through carefully, especially the extent to which they are used for brand communication. It is, after all, possible to have too much of a good thing. Logos, end lines and musical ‘stings’ are the most basic and harmless examples of distinctive assets. The challenge comes when the distinctive assets start to find their way into the fabric of the communication itself and take centre stage at the heart of the execution.
Distinctive assets can quickly become a creative and strategic straight-jacket. Close to home and more painfully, I once worked on a wine brand that had an eagle as the brand's logo and core distinctive asset in the advertising. The television ads featuring an eagle in flight to a classical score (and not much else) actually worked extremely well at driving awareness and connected seamlessly with the wine label on shelf in store. For a long time the soaring eagle, simple as it was, worked well and the brand was very successful. Loyal customers loved it. But over time the brand started to lose relevance and wasn't attracting a new audience. Try as we might, we couldn't find a way of using an eagle in flight to communicate a bigger idea in a way that worked. Every way we turned our giant eagle was crowding out the idea. Eventually we were fired, and shortly after, so was the eagle but too late to save the account. So when looking to introduce distinctive assets front and centre into the DNA of a campaign it’s good to think through whether or not it will provide enough potential for variation and engagement over time.
Distinctive assets can also have a cultural and social shelf life. Solo’s remarkably successful campaign dating back to the 1980s featured Solo Man himself as the primary distinctive asset (complete with moustache, canoe and macho charisma) often pitted in a lone battle against the wild. It was certainly a powerful and motivating symbol of masculinity in its time. But today society, and our views of what constitutes an acceptable version of masculinity, have moved on. So the brand decided to kill off its most famous distinctive asset and present a new version of masculinity. It did however, keep the music from the previous campaigns which maintains a link to those older existing memory structures, while still letting the brand move on with a more contemporary depiction of manhood. Cultural relevance can often be a good guide as to which distinctive assets should be retained and which might need to be gently shunted off stage.
It’s also true that brands can be successful without any core distinctive assets at the centre of their advertising and communication at all. Volkswagen in the UK had extraordinary success over decades with its Volkswagen Golf advertising, helping the model become the third highest selling car in the UK (as outlined in the IPA Effectiveness Gold Award winning paper: VW Golf 30 Years In the Making, 2006). The advertising featured no distinctive assets of any type, but instead retained a consistent tone of voice and the flexibility to produce ideas that reflected real human truths told in a compelling way. More recently John Lewis, in one the most effective campaigns of the past decade, has achieved extraordinary success with a series of television ads focused around different expressions of the true spirit of Christmas rather than locking into a familiar and repeated set of distinctive brand assets.
Nike has used celebrity distinctive assets in the form of Michael Jordan, Lebron James and most recently Colin Kaepernick in its advertising for decades. What is interesting about Nike’s approach is that the distinctive asset of celebrity, has never seemed bigger than the Nike brand itself, no matter how famous the athlete - and in the case of Michael Jordan and Lebron James, they don’t get much more famous. The core brand idea of heroic achievement always seems to come through strongly. It’s always about Just Do It, a key asset in its own right, rather than an ad about celebrity.
Another example where there is the right balance between flexibility and consistency is the famous Reassuringly Expensive campaign by Stella Artois. By establishing a consistent brand world reminiscent of European cinema and influenced by Jean De Florette - french feel, rural setting, realistic but idiosyncratic characters - the brand established a visual look that was highly recognisable and distinctive. But it also had the flexibility to tell any manner of different stories of sacrifice for a glass of Stella Artois. It was a great example of distinctive assets applied with tact and in a way that provided great storytelling flexibility.
Distinctive assets can be a brilliant tool for building long term brand equity and they have a place in any discussion around brand and campaign strategy. But, distinctive assets, no matter how good they are at nudging memory structures or creating mental availability, should always serve the brand idea, not the other way around. After all, Nike, John Lewis and Volkswagen are good reminders that the most powerful distinctive asset is always the brand idea itself.