Distinctive Brand Assets

What Are Distinctive Brand Assets?

Distinctive brand assets are the non-name elements, such as sounds, colours, logos, characters and taglines, that trigger a brand in memory. The concept, formalised by Byron Sharp and Jenni Romaniuk at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, holds that assets earn value through fame and uniqueness: how many people link the asset to the brand, and to that brand only.

Distinctive Brand Assets in Practice

The framework comes from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science: Byron Sharp’s How Brands Grow argued that brands grow through mental and physical availability, and Jenni Romaniuk’s Building Distinctive Brand Assets set out how to measure assets on two axes, fame and uniqueness. This gives sonic branding its strongest commercial argument, because sound is measurable on exactly those terms. The textbook sonic example is the Intel bong, composed by Walter Werzowa in 1994: played at the end of partners’ Intel Inside advertisements, it achieved enormous fame and near-total uniqueness for a component brand consumers never see. When a sound reaches that status, it can carry branding on its own, without a logo on screen.

Famous Example

The Intel bong, composed by Walter Werzowa in 1994