What are distinctive brand assets?

Distinctive brand assets are the elements, other than the brand name, that make people think of the brand: colours, logos, shapes, characters, typefaces, taglines and sounds. The term comes from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science, where Byron Sharp’s “How Brands Grow” argued that brands grow by being easy to notice and easy to buy, and Jenni Romaniuk’s “Building Distinctive Brand Assets” set out how to measure the elements that do the noticing. The test for any asset is two questions: how many people link it to the brand, and how many link it to this brand only. Fame and uniqueness. An asset that scores high on both can carry the brand on its own, without the name in sight.

Why sound qualifies

Sound is a distinctive asset with two advantages the visual ones lack. It works when nobody is looking, which is most of the time: the advert playing in the next room, the phone in a pocket, the podcast on a run. And it is processed quickly and remembered for a long time, because melody and rhythm recruit parts of memory that logos do not. That makes a sonic logo one of the most efficient assets a brand can build, and one of the most neglected. Most brands measure their colour and their logo and have never tested whether anyone recognises their sound.

Measuring a sonic asset

The method is the same as for any other asset. Play the sound to a sample of the category’s buyers with no branding attached and ask which brand it belongs to. The share who name the brand is fame. The share who name it and no other brand is uniqueness. A sound that scores low on fame but high on uniqueness is an investment waiting to be made: nobody knows it yet, but it is nobody else’s. A sound that scores high on fame and low on uniqueness is a warning: the brand is building someone else’s asset, which is what happens with library music and licensed hits. Repeat the test yearly and the chart tells the brand whether its media spend is building recognition or just reach.

Famous sonic assets

The Intel bong. Composed by Walter Werzowa in 1994 and played at the end of partners’ “Intel Inside” advertisements. It achieved enormous fame and near-total uniqueness for a component brand consumers never see, which is the textbook case: when a sound reaches that status it carries branding on its own.

McDonald’s five notes. Cut from the 2003 “I’m Lovin’ It” jingle and now played without the lyric in most markets. Famous, unique, and short enough to end any advert.

Netflix’s “ta-dum”. The 2015 start sound, built by sound designer Lon Bender, heard at the beginning of every title. High fame, high uniqueness, and a reminder that a distinctive asset can be a designed sound rather than a melody.

The Nokia tune. Famous enough in its day that a few notes from a 1902 guitar piece meant one Finnish company to most of the planet.

Distinctive sonic assets from our studio

Your Bazaar, a UAE marketplace for an audience of more than a hundred nationalities, needed to be remembered fast across radio, digital and social. We reimagined the final phrase of “Happy Birthday” and rhythmically adapted it to sing “yourbazaar.ae”: part sonic logo, part jingle, part call to action, familiar on first hearing and nobody else’s by the second. It won Gold for Best Audio Brand at the Transform Awards MEA 2025.

PetCentral set out to make a sound no competitor could replicate, so we built the identity from the actual voices of its customers’ pets: more than a hundred recordings submitted through a bespoke upload portal, cleaned, pitched and sculpted into a modular audio identity. Uniqueness by construction. It won Bronze for Best Audio Brand (Consumer) at the Transform Awards MEA 2026.

For the Islamic Arts Biennale in Jeddah, with .Pomelo and the Diriyah Biennale Foundation, the sonic identity had to work across films, social content, installations, events and national moments while staying one coherent musical world. It won Gold at the Transform Awards MEA 2026, Bronze at the Clio Music Awards and Winner at the International Sound Awards 2025.

Building one

Three rules follow from the research. Be consistent: the same sound, in the same place, every time, for years, because fame is built by repetition and destroyed by variety. Be unique from the start: test the candidate sounds against the category before committing, so the brand is not paying to make a generic sound famous. And own it outright: a licensed track can be withdrawn, repriced or sold to a competitor, and an asset you do not own is not an asset. See buyout.

Frequently asked questions

Is a sonic logo a distinctive brand asset?
It is the most common sonic one. A brand’s melody, its voice, its product sounds and even a signature instrument can all qualify, as long as they are consistently used and measurably linked to the brand.

How long does it take to build fame?
Years, with consistent exposure. Intel’s bong and McDonald’s five notes have had decades. The mistake is changing the sound before it has had the chance.

Can a brand have too many distinctive assets?
Yes. Spreading exposure across many assets slows each one down. Most brands should build two or three, and a sound should be one of them.

Who came up with the term?
The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute at the University of South Australia. Jenni Romaniuk’s 2018 book is the standard reference.

Related terms: mnemonic, sonic DNA, brand fit, earworm, sonic identity. For the wider discipline, see sonic branding.