Our Creative Director Dan Sharp tells us why creating – and maintaining – brand assets is crucial to recall and memorability.
What are Distinctive Brand Assets?
A distinctive brand asset – also known as a DBA or brand code – is a sensory device that triggers the brand name for an in-category buyer. These triggers could be patterns, colours, typefaces, packaging shapes, mascots, celebrity faces or voices, jingles, scents – essentially, anything that’s used consistently in marketing.
How do they work?
DBAs help create easily-recognisable brands, which simplifies our decision-making process by reducing cognitive load. By peppering out- of-home activity, TV ads, pre-roll, in-store, digital advertising and so
on with two or three distinctive sensory cues, brands can increase the chance of the experience being remembered, in addition to boosting awareness.
This is all done without the need to display the brand name – just like how seeing George Clooney holding an espresso makes us think of Nespresso, without the name or logo present. Other examples include the shape of the Coca-Cola bottle, McDonald’s’ tagline and the Heinz frame.
Do you know which brands these assets belong to?
Coca-Cola
Heinz
Compare the Market
Why are they important?
The first job of advertising is to be noticed…the second job is for consumers to know it’s you!
A major reason TV adverts aren’t correctly attributed back to the brand being advertised is often due to a lack of DBAs, reducing the chance of the brand being stored in memory.
Carefully selected and nurtured brand assets can also bridge multi- platform messages, with a set of codes clearly linking a billboard to a social ad or a pre-roll to a sponsorship message.
This linking ensures that memory links to the brand are being constantly refreshed.
Strong Distinctive Assets require a long-term commitment to create and maintain the necessary memories. – FROM BUILDING DISTINCTIVE BRAND ASSETS – JENNI ROMANIUK
Creating DBAs
DBAs are created analytically through auditing and measurement, followed by ongoing maintenance.
Work out what you already have:
A brand audit can identify existing brand assets. This involves collating all of your marketing touchpoints, then spending time reviewing the sensory landscape. You should ask yourself what assets appear consistently, in addition to what you feel is most unique to your brand.
Measure anything that you feel is a strong DBA:
A simple recognition survey to the target audience will reveal how well-known – and how unique – your assets are. You can then create a grid to map your assets to inform decisions on whether to invest time developing them or dropping them altogether.
The ‘fame’ score tells us how much recognition an asset has. The ‘uniqueness’ score tells us to what degree an asset was linked to one brand and nobody else.
Create assets based on what you can own:
It is also possible to make a distinctive asset from scratch, although it can take time to build mental links.
You should also ensure that your overall brand awareness is high for the brand assets to take effect – it will be more difficult for in-category buyers to link the asset to your brand if their general awareness of you is low.
Here at Denfield, when we undertake a brand audit or refresh – or indeed a rebrand – with a client, DBAs are a key part of our strategy.
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