Nerd Alert: Your Strongest Distinctive Brand Asset

Summary

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Episode Overview

Episode Title: Nerd Alert: Your Strongest Distinctive Brand Asset
Date: June 4, 2026
Podcast: The Marketing Architects
Hosts: Elena Jasper & Rob DeMars

This episode dives deep into new research on the power of distinctive brand assets, with a special focus on why shape-based assets outperform other common markers like color, audio, and verbal assets in terms of brand recognition and memory. Drawing from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute’s latest benchmarking study, the hosts break down what makes certain brand elements more memorable and actionable guidance for marketers looking to build a durable brand identity.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Importance of Distinctive Brand Assets

• Definition: Distinctive assets are any non-brand name elements consumers link to a brand—logos, colors, shapes, jingles, taglines, mascots, spokespeople, etc.
• Quick Quiz:
  • Golden Arches? “McDonald’s.” (01:09)
  • Bitten Apple? “Apple.”
  • Swoosh? “Nike.”
  • Mobius? “Marketing Architects.” (01:15)

2. The Research: Ehrenberg-Bass Institute Study

• Scope:
  • Analyzed over 1,000 brand assets across 21 product categories, 4 countries (US, UK, Australia, New Zealand), and 9 years of product data.
• Purpose: First large-scale benchmarking of distinctive asset performance, providing real comparative numbers.

3. What Makes an Asset “Distinctive”?

• Two Metrics:
  • Fame: Proportion of category buyers linking the asset to the right brand.
  • Uniqueness: Share of people associating the asset exclusively with the target brand.
• Overall Averages:
  • 26% fame, 54% uniqueness.
  • Most assets are unique, but few are well-known.

4. Shapes Outperform Other Assets

• Key Finding:
  • Shape-based assets (logos, packaging shapes, symbolic images) averaged 40% fame and 71% uniqueness—the highest out of all asset types.
  • Color assets scored the lowest: 12% fame, 39% uniqueness.
• Explanation:
  • “It's really hard to own a color. There's only so many colors out there, right? If you look at Coca Cola, Target, Netflix, YouTube, State Farm, they're all red. That's tough.” — Rob (04:03)
  • Owning a color is rare, even for big brands—exceptions like Tiffany Blue, which took decades.
  • Shapes benefit from the bizarreness effect—unusual stimuli are more memorable.

5. Audio and Word-Based Assets

• Surprising Result:
  • Audio (jingles) and word-based assets (taglines) performed similarly and not as distinctively as shapes.
  • Both are usually embedded within ads and not as omnipresent as logos or shapes. Once the ad campaign ends, the asset disappears.

6. Special Note for Service Brands

• In categories without tangible products (insurance, telecom, entertainment), narrative-driven assets (brand stories, style moments) are more important.
• Relates to prior research: emotional advertising is especially effective for service-based businesses.

7. Strategic Takeaways for Marketers

• Protect Your Shapes: Don’t casually change logos or packaging—“The brand graveyard is full of companies that did” (e.g., Tropicana).
• Don’t Rely on Color Alone: “Every building has paint.” Color is a supporting, not primary, asset.
• Service Brands: Invest in storytelling and style since you lack physical touchpoints.
• Measuring Success:
  • If uniqueness is high but fame is low, focus your strategy on increasing awareness—through media, repetition, and consistent usage.
• Asset Portfolio Analogy:
  • “Your shape-based assets like the logo or the packaging are the steel frame. They hold everything up ... Your color is the paint on the walls ... Your jingle or tagline is the furniture inside.” (06:48)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On shapes and the bizarreness effect:
  “A swoosh doesn’t look like anything else.” — Elena (04:59)
  “The researchers tie this to something called the bizarreness effect ... Unusual stimuli are more memorable than generic ones.” — Elena (05:14)
• Color is hard to own:
  “It's hard to own the color red. So, yeah, I guess it makes sense now that you put the data to it.” — Rob (04:03)
• On changing logos or packaging:
  “Don’t mess with logos or packaging casually because the brand graveyard is full of companies that did.” — Elena (06:32)
• Distinctive asset as the building analogy:
  “Shapes are the steel frame. Color is the paint. Jingle or tagline is the furniture inside. Build the fame first. Make it strange enough that nobody else’s building looks like yours.” — Elena (06:52)

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Important Timestamps

• 01:06-01:17 — Brand Shapes Quick Quiz
• 01:17-01:54 — Introduction to Ehrenberg-Bass Institute Research
• 02:32-04:03 — Discussion of Data: Shape vs. Color Asset Performance
• 05:14 — Introduction of the Bizarreness Effect
• 05:53-06:28 — Audio and Word-Based Asset Surprising Findings
• 06:28-07:30 — Strategic Takeaways and Asset Analogy
• 07:30-08:05 — Reflections and Next Steps for Marketers

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Summary Takeaways

• Shape-based assets (like logos and packaging) are the most powerful and memorable brand cues across categories.
• Color is the least effective stand-alone distinctive asset due to its ubiquity and shared use among brands.
• Marketers should focus on making their distinctive assets both famous and unique.
• Service brands should lean on narrative and style since physical assets are limited.
• Protect and invest in your unique shapes—and avoid unnecessary changes to key visual elements.

This concise breakdown arms marketers with current research findings and clear practical counsel to fortify brand distinctiveness for long-term impact.

Transcript

[A]

Nerd Alert. Learning is important, right?

[B]

Yes, exactly. What a bunch of nerds.

[A]

Nerd alert. Right.

[B]

Marketing Architects. Hello and welcome to the Marketing Architects, a research first podcast dedicated to answering your toughest marketing questions. I'm Lena Jasper on the marketing team here at Marketing Architects, and I'm joined by my co host, Rob DeMars, a chief product architect of misfits and machines.

[A]

Hey, Elena.

[B]

Hello. We're back with your weekly Nerd Alert. Every week I'll take a deep dive into academic marketing research and translate its complex ideas into into simple, understandable language for Rob, and of course, for all of you. Are you ready to nerd out, Rob?

[A]

Alina, I am so ready to nerd out that my distinctive asset is my bald head and a complete inability to pronounce Jenny Romani. Romanique. Romanique. Hey, she's amazing, but I just, I can't pronounce her last name.

[B]

I'm sorry, I don't think that makes you that distinctive, unfortunately, because I think a lot of people struggle too with her name. I believe it's Romanic. When I asked the Aaronberg Bass Institute, but yes, us Americans have trouble have trouble with that. Well, let's play a quick game before we jump into the research. Today I'm going to tell you a shape and you got to name the brand.

[A]

Ooh.

[B]

All right, this should be pretty easy. Golden arches.

[A]

McDonald's.

[B]

A bitten apple. Apple A Swoosh.

[A]

Nike.

[B]

A Mobius.

[A]

Marketing Architects.

[B]

There you go. Perfect. So pretty easy. Pretty easy. Quiz. That level of brand recognition is what this paper is about. I read a paper titled Shape Based Assets are Strongest Benchmarking Distinctive brand asset performance across industries. This is Ehrenberg Bass Institute research from the Adelaide University in Australia. It's by Pelin Pua, Larissa Bailey, Zach Ansbury and Byron Sharp. It was published in the International Journal of Advertising this year. So it's a fresh one. This is the first large scale benchmarking study of distinctive brand assets. And it gives us some actual numbers to compare against. Let's rewind really quick and just make sure everybody knows what a distinctive asset is. It's any non brand name element that consumers associate with a specific brand. So it could be logos, colors, packaging, shapes, jingles, taglines, mascots, spokespeople, the Geico Gecko, the Coca Cola bottle, Intel's chime, all distinctive assets. They're cues that help consumers recognize a brand without seeing its name. So what the researchers did is they analyzed over a thousand of these assets across 21 product categories. Four countries, the US, the UK Australia, New Zealand, and nine years of product data. So big data set here. But Rob, before I get into the results, if you had to guess which type of distinctive asset do you think performed the best in consumer memory?

[A]

Feel like you just told me with

[B]

the shapes, what would you have thought before I spoiled it?

[A]

I would have gone with my classic standby of audio. I still just go with that being one of the most underutilized and highly impactful way to distinguish yourself.

[B]

That's what I always thought too, and I think that has been the belief. But this study found something a little bit different. This recent study, it didn't find that audio assets aren't super powerful, but it found that, yeah, shapes are more powerful than I thought. But let's talk about it. So first they measured each asset on the two dimensions of distinctiveness. Fame, which represents how many category buyers can link the asset to the correct brand, and uniqueness, which represents the share of people who associate that asset with any brand. And then what share links it exclusively to the target brand? The overall average across the thousands of assets was 26% fame, 54% uniqueness. So most of the assets were reasonably unique, but they were not well known enough yet. The primary challenge for most brands isn't owning an asset, it was making sure enough people are aware of it. Then the researchers broke down performance by asset type. And the gap between the best and, and the worst was pretty large. So shape based assets, logos, packaging shapes, symbolic images, those came in at 40% fame and 71% uniqueness. That was the strongest of any category by a wide margin. Just to compare color assets had a score of 12% fame, 39% uniqueness. They came in dead last out of their distinctive asset friends. So Rob, does that surprise you that color performed that badly?

[A]

You know, yes and no. Colors, obviously something that in marketing circles we talk about a lot, like, oh, how's our color against our competition? But then you, you look at it and you're like, wow, it's really hard to own a color. There's only so many colors out there, right? If you look at Coca Cola, Target, Netflix, YouTube, State Farm, they're all red. That's tough. You know, it's hard to own the color red. So, yeah, I guess it makes sense now that you put the data to it.

[B]

Yeah, agreed. Every brand has a color, so every color is almost never uniquely associated with one brand. There's just too much competition. I was thinking the same thing about the color red. Got Coca Cola, kfc, Target, they all use red. We actually did this as a game. Once I was saying colors and you were saying what brand you thought of. Do you remember that? With Ange? And you all had totally different brands. Like, it was really hard to like actually guess the brand that I was thinking in my head. So owning a color is an exception. It usually takes decades of dominance or a trademark like Tiffany Blue. But shapes can be generally weird and distinctive. A swoosh doesn't look like anything else. And the researchers tie this to something called the bizarreness effect, which I like. I think you should start using that in misfits. Misfits and machines.

[A]

I like that.

[B]

Right. It's the idea that unusual stimuli are more memorable than generic ones. So logos and packaging shapes tend to be strange enough to stand out, while colors tend to blend in. One other thing worth flagging, audio and word based assets performed roughly the same as each other in this study. The they weren't statistically different and prior research suggested that jingles beat taglines in memory. This study found something different. And both asset types face a real limitation, which is they mostly appear inside ads alongside other queues. They rarely show up on their own. So the moment an ad stops running, they disappear. So that makes a lot of sense to me. Like a logo lives basically forever everywhere a jingle. If you're not consistently using your jingle, it could just fade away. So I think it's harder for it to score super high. There was an exception worth noting for service brands when they're looking at different categories, different industries like insurance, telecom, entertainment, where you don't have a physical product to see in those cases, narrative driven assets like brand stories, brand style moments, those performed relatively better than in other categories. So if you don't have a product on the shelf, you need something else to anchor the brand in memory. And that's where those stories worked well. Which reminded me of a study we covered a couple of weeks ago where we talked about how emotional advertising worked better for like service based businesses. So I thought that was interesting. Okay, takeaways for marketers. Protect your shape based assets. First, don't mess with logos packaging casually because the brand graveyard is full of companies that did. We could name some of them like Tropicana and others. Don't anchor your identity to color alone. It can play a supporting role, but it's a weak standalone asset for almost every brand. If you work in services, invest in narrative assets, storytelling and brand style that can compensate for your lack of physical brand cues. Use fame and uniqueness as your measuring stick. So if your assets score high on Uniqueness, but low on fame. Your job is to expand, reach. More media, more touch points, more consistency. All right, time for round GPT. Think of building a distinctive asset portfolio, like constructing a building your shape based assets like the logo or the packaging are the steel frame. They hold everything up. They don't change season to season. And they're what people recognize from a distance. Your color is the paint on the walls. It can be beautiful. It definitely matters. But every building has paint. Your jingle or tagline is the furniture inside. Build the fame first. Make it strange enough that nobody else is building looks like yours. All right, what do we think?

[A]

That one way it's such a great lever to be thinking about and it seems like you default to logo generally, right? Like that's the easiest thing to change and to influence when trying to think of a shape. But then, you know, you get into packaging like the, the Coca Cola bottle and then the next level is the product itself. Right. And that's probably the hardest to try to differentiate yourself in terms of like the thing like nerds, the nerds candy. That's a very distinctive asset, both in their decision to go very tiny. So yeah, that's a. That's a good one. What do you think?

[B]

I really liked it. I like the recency of it. I think it makes a lot of sense. I think it's good to have diverse, distinctive assets, but it's also another reason to protect your logo. Don't change it all the time. I thought the insight on color was interesting too, as a brand that, you know, we have our protagonist blue color and I love using it, but it's a good reminder that you shouldn't depend too heavily on it because it is the weakest distinctive asset. Okay, that's it for this episode of the Marketing Architects. We'd like to thank Taylor De Los Reyes for producing the show. You can connect with us on LinkedIn and if you like the podcast, please leave us a review. Now go forth and build great marketing architects.