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Episode 138

So You Think You're Distinctive?

Less than half of ads are correctly attributed to the right brand after viewing. And it takes two to three years of consistent investment before a brand asset truly feels like it belongs to you.

This week, Elena, Angela, and Rob explore what it actually means to build distinctive brand assets. They dig into Mark Ritson's latest column for Marketing Week, break down the research on what makes assets memorable, and share why most marketers quit way too soon. Plus, test your own knowledge with a distinctive assets quiz.

Topics Covered

• [01:00] What distinctiveness actually means for your brand

• [04:00] Why creativity and distinctiveness aren't the same thing

• [09:00] Why you need seven brand cues to boost recall to 100%

• [14:00] Brands that nailed distinctiveness over decades

• [18:00] Balancing creative freshness with brand consistency

• [22:00] How to measure if your assets are truly distinctive

Resources:

2025 The Drum Article

Today's Hosts

Elena Jasper

Chief Marketing Officer

Rob DeMars

Chief Product Architect

Angela Voss

Chief Executive Officer

Transcript

Rob: They treat consistency like it's sort of a leash or creative prison that you're supposed to work within, but the trick isn't to reinvent your brand every year. It takes real creativity to think within the confines of your brand assets and keep them fresh and keep them exciting.

Elena: Hello and welcome to the Marketing Architects, a research first podcast dedicated to answering your toughest marketing questions.

I'm Elena Jasper. We're on the marketing team here at Marketing Architects, and I'm joined by my co-host Angela Voss, the CEO of Marketing Architects. And Rob DeMars, the Chief Product architect of Misfits and Machines.

Angela: Hello.

Elena: We're back with our thoughts on some recent marketing news, always trying to root our opinions and data research and what drives business results. Today we're tackling one of the most misunderstood topics in branding, distinctiveness. Marketers love to talk about standing out, but what does it actually mean to be distinctive, and how long does it take before something like a color, a sound, or even a mascot becomes truly yours? I'll kick us off as I always do with some research, and today we're digging into Mark Ritson's latest column for Marketing Week.

It's titled, we "We Know What Distinctive Marketing looks Looks like. Now let's Let's agree Agree what What to call Call it." In the article, he calls for a ceasefire in marketing's ongoing terminology war over what to call distinctive brand assets from brand codes to fluent devices. Ritson argues that while the names differ, the principle is the same. Great marketing builds memory structures through consistent, recognizable cues. He starts with a new research from System One and the FU IPA database, which shows that the most effective ads share three traits. They make people feel something. They run for years, not months, and they're clearly branded because while we as marketers might think branding an ad is obvious, it turns out audiences often don't.

Less than half of ads are correctly attributed to the right brand after viewing, which is sad. So Ritson points out it's not enough to make great creative. You have to make it unmistakably yours,. Ipsos data showing that if your 32nd 30-second ad includes seven, big that's a big number, seven recognizable branding moments, recall shoots to a hundred percent. Then there's this big message from the article. Distinctiveness isn't one dimensional. It's built over time through consistent, emotionally resonant branding that audiences can instantly recognize even when your logo isn't there. Alright, so when I read that article, the number seven really shocked me.

That's a lot to stack into your ads. I was trying to count them in my head, different commercials I was viewing, but it did inspire this episode to break this down a little bit, because I think distinctiveness is such an important topic. And I'm not sure if it's broadly known, just how important it is to be both distinctive and consistent in that distinctiveness in your advertising. So why don't we start from the basics and what does it actually mean for a brand to be distinctive?

Angela: I think you gave a lot of really good definitions. I think Jenni has a lot of really great definitions related to distinctiveness, but in my head, distinctiveness is just about being recognizable at a glance. I love the term smashable. I can't remember where that came from. I don't know if you guys remember,

Rob: The book.

A book, I think it's called,

Elena: The book.

Rob: It's from a book.

Angela: It's from a book. Okay,

Elena: Perfect. We narrow it down.

Angela: Yeah. We'll try to figure out which one that is.

Rob: I remember. It was available in audio.

Elena: Great.

Angela: Anyway, if you were to be able to take the brand and smash it, like a Coke bottle, if it was smashed, you would know it was Coke without even being able to read the logo,. They're red, and they're not distinctive because they're different necessarily, but they've owned that shade of red for a very long time. Same thing with Tiffany and the blue. So it's just about building and protecting those memory shortcuts, which are those things that help you recognize the brand without even having to think about it.

Elena: So in the article, Ritson talks about how most people can't even recall—I think it's like more than half or nearly half—which brand an ad is for. Why is that such a problem today?

Rob: Interesting because we often mistake creativity for distinctiveness and they're two very different animals. Maybe they're related, but they're two different animals. Too many ads are clever, but few are just clear and crisp and remarkably convey the value proposition in a still fresh and surprising way.

We keep trying to win awards, but not necessarily memory space, and you can't build recall if your audience is sitting there trying to figure out your ad, trying to decode the ad and figure out what it is that you're selling. I think the second is that distinctiveness needs to be paired with repetition, and too often we're living in a quarterly world. New campaign, new agency, new look.

Angela: Yeah, I agree. I think we as marketers get bored way faster than consumers do. I would also say, you said confusion versus memory, or what did you say? Say?

Rob: Creativity.

Angela: Creativity versus distinctiveness. Yeah, that's what it was. I also think that sometimes marketers are confusing attention with distinctiveness as well, just in that if we can gain attention, then those memory structures should be there, and that's the problem. That's what we're trying to solve with distinctive assets, is ensuring that if you're going to pay to ensure you have millions of impressions in the market that it's memorable and it's distinctive to you versus to your competitors.

Elena: I think you're both right. There's this issue of first, do I have enough distinctive assets in an ad? It's not enough as we learn from this article to just have a logo at the end. And like Rob said, sometimes we get so excited trying to be creative all the time that you end up looking totally different except for maybe your logo and the sonic brand at the end. So it's making sure that you actually have enough distinctive assets in your ad and then, Ang, sticking to it for a long period of time, which we see again and again can be hard for brands. If we switch to talking a little bit about the how, like we know distinctiveness is important, it's not easily done today. Let's talk about the timeline. How long does it actually take? Like if you need to be consistent over time, how long do I need to be using my color, my mascot or my slogan, until it becomes truly ownable to my brand?

Angela: This is a tough question because it's hard to study because so many brands don't do it. You know what I mean? There's limited data for it. I think the answer is longer than most marketers realize, or maybe even want to hear because to our point earlier, we do get bored of what we're doing. The research from Ehrenberg-Bass shows it usually takes two to three years of consistent repeated exposure before a distinctive asset starts to feel like it truly belongs to you.

And that's assuming you're using it everywhere across your ads, your packaging, social, sponsorships. So the brain just has enough repetition to make that link automatically. And most brands just quit too soon. They test a new slogan. Maybe they use it for a season, then they move on. But these assets build and compound like interest. You earn distinctiveness the same way you earn trust slowly by showing up every time in the same way.

Elena: Yeah. So two to three years of consistent investment to even get it considered. And then I'm guessing you can't stop,

Angela: Totally. Gotta keep it going.

Elena: Yeah. That's much longer than I think a lot of people end up investing in mascots or certain campaigns. Rob, we are a TV agency and so we tend to look at things through the lens of television. How does that research and just walking us through, what is distinctive assets research, how does it apply to TV advertising creative specifically?

Rob: Well, I am biased. But TV is the ultimate memory machine. If you agree that distinctiveness is about memory structures, it's the channel that really has it all, you've got sight, sound, motion, emotion. It's just a full sensory playground that allows you to really unveil your assets in the brightest stage possible, with just the greatest ability to actualize the full value of the sound and the picture and the storytelling and the emotion. I think secondly, television has an advantage in conveying emotion, and as Ritson's data shows emotion tied with long-term branding is what drives the effectiveness. And TV can do it well. It can drive the emotion. It's a storytelling platform that is serial in nature, so it can extend year after year.

Elena: So the article, he was focused on TV for a large portion of it, and that's where he references data from System One, that the magic number is seven brand cues per ad. Rob, I was having trouble trying to think of seven honestly, that you could pack into a commercial. What kind of cues count towards that and can you name seven for us?

Rob: I think when you actually spend the time and just go through the list, they're actually not that surprising and not that hard to incorporate. You start with the most obvious, the logo, right? Logos are so underused in television in particular, yet they're the most obvious to use. It's the logo of the product. It's your visual signature. Why wouldn't you use the logo in your ad? There's color, right? Ang mentioned earlier, the Coca-Cola red. I'm not sure I've ever seen a Coca-Cola TV commercial that didn't feature somehow the color red. Then you have your sonic, jingle, personal favorite. Your Netflix ta-dum, how you can utilize the untapped potential of audio. There's so many brands that don't use an audio signature.

It's just a free move to differentiate yourself, to be distinctive, using an audio signature. Mascots—obviously they're always a fun asset. They also help with the storytelling of your brand, using a particular spokesperson. You have like Flo from Progressive. That's an asset,. A tagline, obvious, another obvious one. And then also I think another underutilized one is the packaging itself. And again, Ang gave a great example of the Coca-Cola bottle and the smashable nature of the bottle, featuring your packaging in the television commercial. So I wasn't counting, but that was a few.

Elena: I think that got us to seven. I was thinking too, I don't know if this counts as a spokesperson, but a voiceover, I don't know if even if you don't have a spokesperson, you could have your own unique voiceover. And then font was another one that I had. I don't know, Angie, if you had any other ones that we missed, but...

Angela: No, I think you guys got it. When I think font, I think Coca-Cola, the script wordmark. It's like, yes, there's a logo in there, but it's very distinctive. Yep.

Rob: See, we're coming up with more than seven.

Angela: Mm-hmm.

Rob: Mark Ritson, we got more than seven.

Elena: All right. Well, earlier we were talking a little bit about timing and needing two to three years for these distinctive assets to really sink in. And can we lose distinctiveness if we change too often, even if sometimes new creative does test well and it is time to change? It's not always best to stick with what we've done, but is there a risk there if we're making too many changes?

Angela: Yeah, I think it's a sneaky trap, especially since I think we are biased as marketers to change and evolve to keep things fresh, we're just wired that way. Great creative testing, I think can trick us into thinking that we're doing something right when we're really resetting those memory structures. Every time you change the look, the tone, the tagline, even if the ad performs beautifully in isolation, you're teaching the audience a new language when maybe they're just starting to understand the old one. Most distinctive brands have a kind of creative discipline. They evolve, but they're not reinventing. McDonald's is great at this. "I'm loving it" for 20 years. Different execution, same melody, same line. And it works.

Rob: Testing kind of tells you if it works today.

Elena: Yeah.

Rob: Testing sort of tells you if an ad will work today in market, you know, and if consumers will emotionally respond to it. But that consistency determines if it will create that long pattern driving memorability that ultimately you need 10 years from now.

Elena: Yeah. It's like getting almost stuck on couponing or discounting. You get in a loop if you're always creating new assets all the time because they test well, it's like, okay, short term it's probably gonna be successful, but it's gonna catch up to you eventually.

Angela: Totally. Yep. Just start within the platform. That's where we go on a pre-testing standpoint. It's like, okay, if it's time to evolve and we need to build new creative, fine, but start within the platform and ideate from there. Test those ideas out.

Elena: What are some examples that we have of brands that we think have really nailed distinctiveness?

Angela: I think we've talked about a lot already, but I was trying to go like, okay, can I find seven? Otherwise, I probably shouldn't give the example. Geico I think does a great job of this, the Geico gecko. "15 minutes could save you 15%" is a distinctive asset. Their green I think is a distinctive asset. This awkward, witty humor tone to what they do, I think is distinctive. They do a hard end card branding as well, which I think is distinctive. And then just that voiceover to your point, I mean it's the gecko voice, but you can hear that on the radio. You don't need to see the gecko, which means that's also distinctive.

Rob: It took me years to realize Gecko and Geico, the play off of the gecko and the Geico, which shows you I'm an idiot. I've got a few that I personally think are distinctive, but I'm gonna put it to the test and ask you guys. So, cell phone category and the brand color asset of hot pink.

Elena: T-Mobile. I actually had T-Mobile in mind when you said cell phone category. I think they are the best branded. Yes,

Angela: Mm-hmm.

Rob: That's a great point. All right. This one is very easy, but again, I think it is a good example of brandable assets. So a TV network and a peacock with a chime,

Angela: NBC.

Rob: Easy. And then the last one, the battery category and a bunny.

Energizer.

Right. Isn't that just amazing though? You just say two things and you're just like, I know the brand.

Angela: What about this?

Rob:

Angela: All right. I'm gonna say toy. This is gonna be harder because I have it in my head, so it's easy, but toy and bright pink.

Elena: Barbie.

Angela: Yes.

Rob: Oh yeah. No,

Elena: Man, this is a fun game.

Rob: We gotta invest in the color pink.

Angela: When you say toy and bright pink, think of how many toy brands probably use pink. Right.

Rob: But they just own it.

Angela: Yeah.

Elena: Yeah, I wish I...

Rob: All right, Elena, quiz us?

Elena: That's my job is games like that. I guess, man, should I try to quiz you with the one that I thought of? Okay. A muscular arm.

Angela: Arm and Hammer.

Elena: Yeah,

Rob: Yeah, that's great. But isn't that...

Elena: That one.

Rob: This is amazing.

Elena: Yeah, that, okay, so that logo, how old do you think that logo is?

Angela: Gotta be super old.

Rob: I would...

Angela: 50 years old.

Elena: More than 150 years.

Angela: Oh, whoa.

Rob: Oh wow.

Elena: That logo goes back to, I think 1867 is when that logo was first created, which just goes to show if you think you need to overhaul your logo sometimes maybe you do, but maybe you don't. They've had the same logo for 150 years and they've also stuck with the same colors and they're just continuing to dominate their category. For any of those brands we mentioned, if you're talking about nailing distinctiveness, almost all of them have been around for a long time, which just shows how important consistency is to distinctiveness. Like part of it's just sticking with it. Like, is that Arm and Hammer logo the greatest thing we've ever seen? Probably not, but they've stuck with it over time. That's what makes it so effective.

Rob: It's one of those logos that you would seriously, not that I'm into tattoos, but like, if you were into tattoos, you wouldn't be completely embarrassed having that as a tattoo. It's just so iconic. It's almost kitschy. Maybe I'm dreaming that up. I don't know. I was like, it'd be kind of cool having an Arm and Hammer tattoo. You're a multipurpose man or woman. You like to flex a little bit. Good logo on the arm.

Elena: Someone probably has it. Chances are, somebody already has it. Well, yeah, I agree. It would be mean. It'd be weird, but I guess not too weird. Alright, so we just gave examples of brands that are distinctive and all of them were brands pretty much that have stuck with their branding for a long time. But there is something to creative freshness. And there are examples of brands who have done a good job of updating distinctive assets or modernizing them. So Rob, how do you think marketers should balance this need for creative freshness with the importance of consistency?

Rob: I think that that's where marketers get this one ass backwards. That really at the end of the day, they treat consistency like it's sort of a leash or creative prison that you're supposed to work within. But the trick isn't to reinvent your brand every year. It's really to reinvent within your assets. And that's hard work. But that's why creatives get paid the big bucks. The job isn't to just sit there and put out something new every quarter. That's actually an easier job to do. It takes real creativity to think within the confines of your brand assets and keep them fresh and keep them exciting. That's why we have jobs.

Elena: Yeah, I love that. For some brands, we were talking about how you need two to three years of this consistent investment to establish a distinctive asset. Some smaller brands, startups, they can't afford that type of repetition. So Rob, what do you think is a smarter way for them to still invest in distinctiveness?

Rob: If you can't afford frequency, I think every brand can always afford feeling, and I think that's what System One's data is really just showing, the power of emotion as a multiplier of effectiveness. Make people feel something and they'll remember who made them feel it. And I think a really great example of a small budget working within these kind of constraints was Liquid Death. When they took on the big water companies like Fiji, they just found a tone that no one else in the water category was using. They made their users feel something.

Sometimes it was humor, sometimes it was uncomfortable, sometimes it was humor. But they prove that distinctiveness isn't about size or budget, it's about being really stubborn about your brand and being loyal to the assets that you create. Establish the distinctive assets and then just beat them like a drum and make your emotion the multiplier against those competitors with the bigger dollars.

Elena: That's great advice. I think that you're right. They're a good example where they were such a category challenger that they needed to go even bolder with their distinctive assets in order to stand out and be memorable. We should probably talk about measurement, because that's something that always comes up in any marketing conversation. But Angie, how can brands measure whether their assets are truly distinctive? Famous and unique as Jenni Romaniuk defines it?

Angela: Yeah, we went through this as an agency when we did our rebranding, which we had reason to do because we found that we weren't distinctive. So don't come at us about our rebranding. Distinctive assets—so the way Jenni defines them, they need to be both famous and unique. So famous means lots of people recognize the device. Unique, meaning they connect only to you in your space. So when people see this color, they hear this sound or phrase, do they recognize it? And do they know instantly which brand it belongs to? Ehrenberg-Bass runs these tests. They'll show, say, 10 logos or colors, one being yours, and ask respondents which brands they link them to.

The assets that score high on both fame and uniqueness are the gold assets. The ones that are famous but not unique, like maybe using blue in banking, don't help you stand out. I think of Chase and Citi—famous, but it's not unique. And you can do a lightweight version of this yourself, you know, show your ad or your packaging design without the logo,. If people can still name you, you've built distinctiveness. If they can't, then you probably haven't.

Elena: That's great. And I think you mentioning us, we did a couple years ago update some of our branding, but that came from this same exercise where we realized that our logo font and color were not, first of all, there was overlap in our category, and second, it was not well known. So for us, there was very low risk to change and then invest in new distinctive assets. But I think the challenge becomes if you already have something that's very established and unique and you're changing it, it's a little bit of a danger zone.

And I know Jenni, she's commented on LinkedIn too, that this is one of those marketing things that you should be thankful for. You don't need to look at this every week,. She recommended once a year for taking a look at your distinctive assets. So be thankful for that, that it's not something you have to be always monitoring. You can just kind of check in on how they're doing. Mm-hmm. Alright. I was trying to think about closing questions for this podcast, and I thought this was kind of a fun one. How much of distinctiveness do we think comes from creativity versus discipline, because we've talked about both today.

Angela: I try to put numbers to it. I don't know if you did that.

But goodness. I absolutely have a spreadsheet in front of me right now.

Good, good, good, good. I put this as 30% creativity and 70% discipline. I think I'm stealing from what you said, Rob earlier, but I feel like creative gives you the hook. So that could be the jingle, the character, the tagline, and we do need creative people and great ideas, but that's super hard to come up with the creative thing that stands out. The discipline turns that hook into memory by repeating it across years and channels. And so I think that's why I believe the 70% is the bigger piece.

Rob: I think it's 71%. Um, but I'll let it slide. I do think though, just gonna double down on what you just said, creativity gets all the credit, but discipline does the work. And I already talked about that ad nauseum earlier, but I'll throw out there, I know Steve, our chief creative officer, has spoken about this in the past on our podcast that having a really tight box that you have to work within in terms of executing a creative campaign is actually very liberating, and it really stimulates the clearest, biggest ideas. So I think just respecting the brand assets and figuring out fun new ways to use your imagination, to double down on the repetition of those assets is the real job to be done.

Elena: Maybe this is a bad question. We don't need to choose, right? Like it can have—if you're disciplined about your distinctive assets, you could be as creative as you want within, like you said, Rob, within the box of what makes you distinctive. But yeah, I agree, the harder effort is probably towards being disciplined about this is who we are, this is what we're gonna do, and then letting the creativity follow that.

Angela: But it's definitely something you need to talk about though at the ideation phase. We do that, right? We're like, does this have legs? Can I envision in years to come, how this extends and how there's different angles and paths to achieve that longevity.

Elena: I think that's a really good point, Ang. It didn't occur to me till now, but different brand assets will also have different shelf lives. So in the instance you were talking about, you're talking about the campaign idea. Does the campaign idea have legs? And what...

Angela: Yes. At other times it's more foundational elements, like perhaps the audio mnemonic or the color red. So not all brand assets are equal in terms of timelines.

Elena: To wrap us up here, I have a fun question. If you had to produce a TV spot today that becomes iconic for 20 years, maybe we say a hundred years, honestly, after that Arm and Hammer stat, what would your recurring device be? And you can only pick one and Ang, you wanna start us out?

Angela: Sure. I'm going with jingle. I'm taking jingle. Good one. There's only one candy bar I sing about. There's only one gum I sing about. It's Kit Kat and Juicy Fruit. Like they just stick. I can sing old jingles from them. There's no reason I should remember them other than it's wired into my brain. It's a neurological thing. So that's the one I'd stick with. Plus, it just is so transferable across many forms of marketing.

Rob: That's a good one. I would love to have created a mascot that transcends advertising into popular culture, like a popular culture icon. Who was the OG that created Lucky The Leprechaun? That'd be cool to say, I am the man or woman that created Lucky The Leprechaun or Charlie, the Tuna. That would be awesome.

Cool.

Elena: You both took the ones I was gonna say. I was gonna say sonic logo and then Ange mentioned before we recorded she was taking that one. Or a jingle. So that one's gone. Then I was gonna go mascot, then Rob took that. So that one's gone. And those are the two top ones. So if I'm looking here at re-ranking them, like...

Rob: Can I throw out an idea? What about a mascot that sings the jingle? Right. Like a combo.

Angela: Yeah.

Rob: Imagine if... Love that. "They're magically delicious." You know? There you go. Right there.

Elena: Yeah, I guess, but that wasn't part of the rules. I guess the next highest ranked distinctive asset is celebrity, which would be tough over a hundred years. I think maybe I would create like an AI...

Rob: It'd actually be a little creepy if...

Elena: That they keep going.

Rob: They did bring the colonel back though from KFC in new ads.

Angela: You just negotiate rights,. You could use their likeness with AI for hundreds of years. You just gotta work it into the contract.

Rob: That's true.

Elena: Yeah,. Would we be okay with that? Then if we don't want celebrity, I don't think that would work over that long of a period of time. Then I'll go with package shape. Think about Pringles. They have those funny ads where your hand's stuck in the Pringles jar. I think that could be an effective one if you went for something. Even Liquid Death has a unique can and stuff, so...

Rob: Yeah, I think packaging is not talked about enough.

Elena: Yeah, you two definitely took the best two.

Angela: We'll let you go first next time.