Recognisably You

💡Test Your Knowledge with the Distinctive Brand Assets Quiz! 💡

Recently, I came across a single potato chip on a London tube station stair. Without branding or a logo – just its product shape. I instantly recognised it as a Pringle. Any other shape, and I'd know what it wasn't, but not what it was. That's a distinctive asset at work.

A brand's distinctive assets capture attention, trigger memories, and enable recognition and correct attribution, strengthening brand equity by enhancing memory structures that increase purchase likelihood. This is what they do, but what are they, and how can brands use their assets to create the greatest impact?

At Ipsos, we define them as: consistent sensory and semantic cues that signal the brand to people in a unique, fast, intuitive way.

Now, of course, people don’t encounter just one brand at a time. We live in a world of constant, varied brand exposure. With multiple channels, infinite scroll and fragmented attention, the places and spaces where brands are discovered are continually evolving – from retail and e-commerce to social media, search and Large Language Models (LLMs). In this environment, distinctive assets ensure a brand stands out and is recognised, making them a critical driver of business success today.

Now, consider the brands that come most readily to mind for you. What makes them instantly recognisable? Throughout this article, you will notice a series of thought starters designed to help you reflect on your brand assets and where they may already be working – or where opportunities still exist.

Principles of Being Distinctive 

We know brands exist in consumers’ minds as a network of thoughts, feelings, images, associations, colours, sounds, symbols and memories. Distinctive assets play a role in activating these memory structures.

In The Power of You, we saw that “distinctive brand assets are more effective than showing or talking about the brand”. This is because brand assets trigger these memory structures, bringing the brand to mind at the moment when it matters. 

In today's fragmented attention economy, brands must capture and hold attention long enough to trigger choice or create recallable memories. Ipsos' Distinctive Brand Assets database, comprising over 1100 assets from 900+ brands worldwide, shows truly distinctive assets are rare. Our proprietary methodology ranks assets by implicit brand linkage and uniqueness as gold, silver, or bronze. Only 15% achieve gold status, instantly and uniquely associating with the right brand.

Gold: Assets instantly and uniquely linked to the correct brand, used in isolation.
Silver: Assets over the average, needing further amplification for stronger association.
Bronze: Weakly linked assets unlikely to signify the brand alone.

This matters because brands with stronger distinctive asset portfolios significantly outperform weaker distinctive asset portfolios across key brand measures such as awareness, consideration and usage (figure 1). Brands with a higher proportion of strong assets – those classified as Gold or Silver - achieved substantially stronger results than brands with fewer strong assets.

Figure 1: Brands with more strong assets perform better

What’s more, when comparing brands with the lowest and highest proportions of strong assets we see a substantial gap. Brands with many strong assets are 31% more likely to be considered and 38% more likely to be used.

This is the recognition multiplier at work: when people recognise a brand quickly and correctly, they are more likely to notice it, consider it and ultimately choose it.

Distinctive assets are not simply creative devices; they are measurable drivers of brand equity and business performance. However, achieving this level of distinctiveness is rare. Only one in five brands has a sufficiently strong portfolio of distinctive assets to consistently deliver these kinds of effects. 

So, while many different types of distinctive assets exist – from logos and colours to characters, packaging and sonic cues – what matters most is not the quantity of assets a brand has, but how effectively they work together to make a brand distinctive and build memory structures over time.

The strongest brands focus on consistently using specific, highly recognisable assets that can be reinforced across channels and contexts. The question then becomes: how can brands use those assets to create the greatest impact?

To explore this further, we will focus on four widely used asset types – product, characters, packaging and sonic cues – while recognising that these principles apply across all asset types.

Combining assets amplifies their impact. Linking visual, verbal, and sonic cues, for example, strengthens memory encoding and brand attribution. Consistency is vital too, balancing freshness with familiarity, and introducing new elements alongside established ones. Ultimately it is about being mindful and considered in the consistent use of your brand’s assets, with the view to increasing your chances of capturing attention in the moment and being chosen in the future.

Turning Distinctiveness into Brand Recognition

Brand assets can drive quick recognition in the moment and contribute to brand equity over time by making the brand even easier to recognise, recall and choose across contexts. The Pringle chip's shape acts as a recognition shortcut, identifying the brand without a logo.

The brands that win are those with the clearest, most consistently used and most intelligently combined distinctive brand assets.

Making Your Brand Recognisable

Distinctive Brand Assets are a brand manager's powerful tool to capture attention, build memory, and support brand choice. Winning brands have clear, consistent, and intelligently combined assets. By knowing your strongest assets, using them deliberately and evolving them carefully, you increase the chances of your brand being recognised in the moment and remembered in the future.

Steps to maximise brand assets:

Evaluate assets: Identify hero assets, weak spots, and brand linkage opportunities.
Create clear guardrails: Define distinctive assets and fixed and flexible elements.
Use assets relentlessly: Apply consistently across channels, track performance.

Brands that are easiest to recognise are often easiest to choose. As a single Pringle chip triggered recognition and purchase intent at a tube station, strong brands build assets with similar impact no matter where they're encountered.

If your logo disappeared tomorrow, what would people unmistakably recognise as you?

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