Distinctive Brand Assets Increase Advertising Impact-New Study Reveals

Using distinctive brand assets (DBAs) – such as logos, jingles and mascots – has a meaningful impact on the results delivered by advertising, and these benefits are likely to multiply over time.

These findings are included in The Creative Dividend, a new book published by System1 and Effie based on an analysis of campaigns from the US, Europe, UK and Ireland.

Why distinctive brand assets matter

Distinctive assets help consumers quickly and easily attribute an ad to a given brand. They also enable people to link different ads and campaigns together over time. Such an outcome results, in part, by building mental associations between a brand and its logo, sonic assets, tagline, and so on.

Commitment matters

The Creative Dividend showed that leveraging DBAs for longer periods of time has a meaningful payoff for brands.

It proved this point using System1’s five-star testing system, where a score of 1.0 means an ad has low growth potential, and a score of 5.0 has exceptional growth potential.

Based on a sample of 56 brands, and 4,164 assets, the study found marketers which used DBAs for one year recorded an average star rating of 2.4 for their ads.

After four and five years of utilising the same brand assets, this average star rating climbed to 3.5 stars.

DBAs deliver strong brand effects

Elsewhere, the analysis compared ad campaigns which featured distinctive assets with campaigns that didn’t.

Campaigns in the former group were 3x more likely to see gains in brand distinctiveness and 2x more likely to enjoy upticks in brand fame.

These brands also significantly outperformed in terms of driving awareness and differentiation with their advertising.

Fluency advantage

One strength of DBAs is enabling greater advertising “fluency” – or the accuracy and speed of brand recognition by consumers.

More specifically, ads using distinctive brand assets had an 86% fluency rating, versus 81% for celebrity endorsers and 79% if neither a famous face nor DBAs were used.

A similar level of advantage was in place for “fast fluency”, or correctly attributing an ad to a brand after just two seconds.

Get the book

You can download a full copy of The Creative Dividend through System1.

Credit: WARC