Jenni Romaniuk is an Australian professor from the Ehrenberg Bass Institute at the University of South Australia. She is also co-author of How Brands Grow part 2 with Byron Sharp. The institute is a firm believer in marketing science. It helps to understand their thinking as the book is firmly in that mould.
As consumers people enter ‘buying zones’ for a category. She calls these category entry points. So for coffee it could be when you wake up, when you are tired, when you are bored, when you meet someone and so on. There are lots of them. As someone enters the zone some brands will come to mind as a result of mental associations. You want your brand to appear in as many buying zones as possible. Brands are generally functionally similar and easily substitutable. If a brand is not available or does not come to mind, it won’t get bought. It is important for brands to understand the category entry points (which are not brand specific) – Research this.
The purpose of a brand asset is to act as a mental trigger for the brand in as many situations as possible. As such a brand asset can be seen as something that signifies the brand. It can be a logo, font, image, song, character, colour. A range of brand assets will allow you to be more creative in staying top of mind.
We need to understand the purpose of an asset is to trigger the brand in memory. So, while it should not cause disgust or alienate, it does not need to be liked and should not have any rich meaning as that will interfere with triggering your brand. It should also be prominent. Research shows people take seconds to choose a brand on a grocery shelf. You have to get noticed.
A brand asset is anything that triggers the brand – it can be a colour, font, image, sound, character, tagline, celebrity, pack shape, even a style.
You build the asset by including the name until it is recognisable enough to use without it. The idea is to have a range of different assets you can use in different situations.
Key things to avoid are assets that cue the category or the competition. So red won’t work for a cooldrink as it will cue Coca-Cola and green won’t work for an environmental product as it will cue the category. Avoid assets that date. Low fat may go out of fashion.
The perfect asset is thus something everyone immediately recognises and associates with your brand and has no meaning other than your brand, so brings nothing else to mind.
You can measure distinctive asset value. It is important as we place greater emphasis on our own actions and have incomplete or inaccurate information on others activities. This noisy processing centre creates errors as we convert our imperfect observations into a judgement. The only possible way to is to measure strength of asset in minds of category buyers.
The best approach is a quantitative survey where you show the asset as a cue and then ask people to mark all the brand names they associate with that asset. (allow multi-mentions and no brand associated). This question will give 2 metrics:
Fame = percentage of respondents mentioning your brand
Uniqueness = percentage of total mentions that mention your brand.
Aim for 100% on both.
This will give you an idea of which assets to invest in. Avoid assets that bring competitors to mind or are generic to category. Avoid overlapping assets – you don’t need 2 logos or 2 taglines. Focus on assets where you are already associated. Monitor competitor assets.
You can analyse to see if asset strength differs by age, area etc… if it does may indicate mismatch in media planning.