Distinctive brand assets

If you run a growing business, chances are you’ve spent time thinking about what makes you different. Your proposition, your values, your positioning. And rightly so, they are all important.

What often gets less attention is something far simpler: whether people can actually recognise you.

In crowded markets, relative differentiation is only worthwhile if it’s noticed and remembered. And that’s where distinctive brand assets come in. They’re one of the most effective, and most underused, tools available to scaling businesses.

Many companies have a logo and maybe a set of brand colours. Fewer have a coherent set of assets that show up consistently and do real work over time.

This piece explains what distinctive brand assets are, why they matter commercially, and how to think about them if you’re a growing brand.

What are distinctive brand assets?

Distinctive brand assets, or DBA’s, are the cues people use to recognise your brand quickly and easily. They’re the things that trigger memory before anyone has read a word or processed a message.

They can include visual assets such as colours, logos, shapes, characters, typography or recurring design devices. They can also include non-visual assets, such as sounds, music, taglines or even consistent behaviours (think Aldi’s cheeky personality on social media).

Professor Jenni Romaniuk, one of the leading experts on the subject, frames distinctive assets as tools for building mental availability. In simple terms, they help your brand come to mind in buying situations.

This matters because most buying decisions don’t involve deep thought or detailed comparison. People notice something familiar, feel comfortable with it, and move on. Distinctive assets act as shortcuts in the brain, making recognition faster and easier.

How distinctive brand assets drive growth

A lot of marketing activity assumes people are paying attention. In reality, attention is scarce and effort is low. Most advertising and content is processed quickly, often peripherally, and then forgotten.

This is where distinctive assets earn their keep.

Research from System1 shows that brands with strong, consistent assets are recognised more quickly and more reliably, even when attention is limited. That recognition increases the chance of being chosen, often without the buyer being able to explain why.

When a buying moment arises, brands that come to mind easily are at a clear advantage and over time, that advantage compounds. Marketing becomes more efficient, growth becomes less reliant on constant acquisition spend, and the brand builds equity that creates long-term value beyond short-term performance

Assets don’t just support brand building in the abstract, they improve the effectiveness of marketing by making it easier for people to identify who is speaking, across channels and over time.

In short, distinctive assets help your brand show up, even when people aren’t really looking.

Some assets simply work harder than others

Not all brand assets are equal in their ability to build memory. Some types consistently outperform others, particularly in low-attention environments.

System1’s research suggests that characters and mascots are among the most powerful assets available to brands. They attract attention, evoke emotion and are easier for the brain to encode and retrieve. Animals, in particular, tend to perform well, perhaps because we’re hardwired to respond to them.

Sonic assets also punch above their weight. A short piece of music or a recognisable sound can trigger brand recognition almost instantly, often more quickly than a visual cue.

Visual devices can be powerful too, but they work best when they’re simple and repeated consistently. Complex systems that rely on explanation or interpretation tend to struggle.

This links closely to Orlando Wood’s work on emotional engagement. His research highlights the importance of fluent, intuitive processing. Assets that feel easy to understand and emotionally legible tend to perform better than those that require effort or interpretation.

Why consistency is harder than it sounds

Most businesses understand that consistency matters, but in practice, it’s one of the hardest things to maintain.

As a brand owner or marketer, you’re immersed in your own work. You see the same assets repeatedly, across presentations, campaigns, decks and internal discussions. Over time, they start to feel stale.

That internal fatigue often leads to change. A refreshed logo, a tweaked colour palette, a new visual style that feels more “modern”. Each change makes sense in isolation. The cumulative effect is fragmentation.

Jenni Romaniuk’s research is clear on this point. Distinctive assets take time to build. Their value comes from repeated exposure over long periods. Frequent changes reset progress and weaken memory structures.

The uncomfortable truth is that most brands give up on their assets long before consumers have even noticed them.

Boredom is not a strategy

Marketing professor Mark Ritson uses the analogy that marketers “don’t bake their cakes for long enough”. He explains that people inside a business experience advertising, branding and creative work very differently from the people outside it. Marketers see every version, every iteration, every internal debate. By the time something goes live, they’re often sick of it.

Consumers, on the other hand, might see it once, fleetingly, if at all.

While Ritson is usually talking about advertising, the same logic applies to distinctive brand assets. Assets are often abandoned just as they’re starting to work, not because they’ve stopped being effective, but because the people closest to them are bored.

For scaling businesses, this is particularly risky. You don’t have the luxury of endless reinvention. Progress comes from patience, discipline and consistency.

A practical sense check for growing businesses

If you’re running or marketing a scaling business, a useful place to start is a simple sense check.

What assets show up most often in your communications? Are there one or two cues that consistently signal your brand, even without your name attached? Do those cues appear across channels, formats and touchpoints? If not, it’s time to define them.

It’s also worth asking whether your assets are distinctive in your category. If your colour palette, typography or tone looks like everyone else’s, it will struggle to cut through, no matter how well it’s applied.

Finally, be honest about time. Have you really given your assets long enough to embed in people’s minds? Or have they been changed because they felt tired internally?

You don’t need lots of assets. In fact, fewer is usually better. The goal is focus, repetition and coherence.

Final thoughts

Distinctive brand assets are one of the simplest and most commercially effective tools available to growing businesses. They help brands get noticed, remembered and chosen.

They also make everything else work harder. Performance marketing, content, partnerships and sales activity all benefit when the brand is instantly recognisable.

Building strong assets takes time. It requires resisting the urge to constantly refresh and trusting that consistency builds value. For businesses with ambition and potential, that discipline can become a real competitive advantage.

If you’re scaling and want to build distinctive brand assets that support long-term growth, rather than constant reinvention, I’d be happy to help.