How strong is your brand’s identity?
10 April 2025
Why you should never underestimate the importance of your brand’s distinctiveness.
By Jon Wilkins
This fifth instalment of our six-part series examining the key success factors that are likely to shape the fortunes of your brand explores the x-factor that can truly set your brand apart from its rivals; your Brand Identity.
If you missed our four earlier articles you can catch up on Brand Salience, Brand Accessibility, Brand Promise or Brand Experience by clicking on them here.
The challenge of keeping your brand ‘unique’
In a world where differentiation based on truly unique product features or tangible benefits can be hard or even impossible to sustain, building a brand with a distinctive identity can make all the difference. It can elevate your brand by making it instantly recognisable, protecting it from erosion by copy-cat brands.
Any brand has to follow its own path to achieving a distinctive and meaningful identity, whether through its design, heritage, purpose or some other unique brand asset. It’s a key part of what makes a brand a brand, rather than just another commoditised product or service.
Distinctiveness outlasts differentiation
In this series, we have already seen how important it is to be clear about your Brand Promise. This depends on distilling your proposition down to clear, compelling brand benefits that address an obvious, real and meaningful need. But your Brand Promise also needs to show how your brand is uniquely able to address the need in a way that others are less able to. There are many examples of successful brands that have built a leading market position on this basis. Good examples include Dyson vacuum cleaners, BYD and Airbnb.
Discrimination on rational features or benefits is not usually possible to maintain indefinitely, even for the examples we have just mentioned. Sometimes it is easy for other brands to enter the market and offer a similar product. Even if you manage to truly differentiate for a while through a clever product innovation or patented idea, others are likely to catch up sooner or later. In mature or narrowly defined categories, there may simply be no other ways left for any brand to differentiate. In reality, many category leaders have numerous very similar rivals.
How truly different is the product or service provided by Coke from Pepsi, Nike from Puma, Persil from Aerial, Visa from Mastercard or UPS from DHL?
There is clearly more to brand success than the traditional Kotlerian mantra of ‘differentiate or die’. Something else is at play.
Implicitly more powerful
The distinctiveness of your brand trumps differentiation because it works in different ways. Differentiation on the basis of unique features or benefits implies rational, logical, conscious decision making. It relies on slow, System 2 thinking. Some of the time that might be relevant, especially if you are making a complex or high value purchase, like a mortgage, or in a category that’s new to you, like leasing a new Electric Vehicle.
The reality is that most of the time we rely far more on our sub-conscious, fast, System 1 thinking to make purchase decisions based on the implicit associations with brands that we have built up over time (something we will be exploring further in our next article on Emotion). These implicit associations will include assets owned by your brand that make it distinctive, without pause for rational thought, evaluation or comparison. They act as triggers that increase the chances of us identifying the brand, for example by helping find products easily on-shelf or online. They can also increase the chances of someone linking your advertising or marketing with your brand, amplifying its ROI.
What’s more, a brand’s distinctive assets are easier to protect and maintain than differentiated product features. Branding devices can often be trademarked and the incentive for other brands to mimic them is limited by the risk that any promotion or advertising they use is more likely to be mis-attributed to the original brand.
How can brands build a distinctive identity?
The most simple and obvious way to build a distinctive identity is through the brand’s visual identity. At the very least, every brand has a logo, but this can also extend to other distinctive visual assets that bring instantaneous recognition of the brand in practical everyday situations.
However, many of the most successful brands go beyond their logo and leverage other forms of asset to build and maintain their distinctive identity in ways that make sense for their brand, category and target consumers. Some of these go further than acting purely as a memory trigger and instead distinguish a brand on the basis of a positive association, value or belief.
Here are some of the most common and successful ways you can build your brand’s identity.
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Visual Assets
- Logos – these can be especially powerful when recognised without the need for a brand name e.g. Apple, Nike or Shell.
- Packaging – both on-pack design but also the shape or format of the pack itself e.g. the Coca-Cola or Heinz Tomato Ketchup bottles.
- Brand colours – many brands have distinctive colours or combinations of colours, and even their own specific pantones creating immediate implicit associations e.g. Cadbury, EasyJet or Google.
- Brand fonts – using corporately designed and owned fonts or typefaces e.g. Nando’s, EE or TUI.
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Advertising slogans/ taglines. Whether visual or oral e.g. Snap, Crackel, Pop! Just do it, or Probably the best… in the world. You know who we mean!
- Branding devices. Including sonic branding (e.g. Danone, Intel or Netflix) or visual devices (e.g. Compare the Market’s Meerkats, the Lloyds Bank black horse, or Constantine the Octopus Energy mascot).
- Personalities. Celebrities can imbue both distinctiveness and positive affinity e.g. George Clooney (and now Brad Pitt) for Nespresso. But proceed with caution! Celebrity endorsement can be expensive to maintain and can backfire if your brand has to rapidly cut ties with a celebrity that’s starting to attract bad press, and there are MANY examples.
- Provenance/ heritage. Leaning on the brand’s origins either in terms of geographical provenance (e.g. Guiness or Mini), or narrative around their history, craftsmanship or local traditions (e.g. Burberry, Timberland or Jack Daniels).
- Guiding purpose. Today’s consumers are increasingly invested in brands that align with their values, beliefs or how they wish to project themselves to the outside world. The unwavering commitment to environmental sustainability of Patagonia offers a great example here.
- Business model. Unique business models, particularly where these support values that target consumers share. For example, Naked Wines funding model supporting the independent winemakers it sources its products from.
On their own, branding devices are no substitute for the brand. They do not happen overnight. They need to be learned over time, slowly building associations through exposure to the brand. However, once established, they can become deeply embedded in our sub-conscious and create a lasting, powerful distinctiveness that is hard for competitors to appropriate or mimic.
Do you understand what shapes your brand’s Distinctiveness?
In our experience the brand’s distinctiveness, and the role of branding assets in shaping it, is too often overlooked. This is sometimes understandable. Brand assets can sometimes be viewed as a given that are so integral to the brand’s essence that you should not risk meddling with them.
Without doubt, they possess a unique power to amplify the effectiveness of any efforts and activities we use to support the brand. Shouldn’t we therefore try to understand how well they are working and whether there are opportunities to improve on them? Equipped with this knowledge we can leverage them more effectively across the range of touchpoints we have with consumers.
Firstly, there is much we can do to understand what makes your brand distinctive in the first place and the role that your brand assets play:
- Using Semiotics to decode HOW your brand’s assets or identity communicates meaning, as well as WHAT associations and meaning they communicate.
- Evaluating your brand assets, by looking at how unique and prevalent they really are and how this compares to key competitive benchmarks.
We can also assess the implicit role your distinctive assets play within specific activities, touchpoints or channels, including:
- Pack design
- Packaging effectiveness
- Advertising testing
- Logo testing
- Brand purpose studies
- Reputation tracking
We can monitor progress through Brand Tracking to understand how well you are building your Distinctive Identity generally, as well as beginning to understand the contribution different parts of your marketing mix are making to it.
A final thought to leave you with… a distinctive identity for your brand is like adding dye to water
If your branding is weak or generic, it's like adding a drop of clear liquid to a glass of water—nothing changes, and no one notices. But if your brand is highly distinctive, it’s like adding a bold, vibrant dye. Suddenly, every drop of marketing (your investment) spreads further, colours the entire glass, and makes an immediate, lasting impression. The more distinctive the dye (your branding), the more effective every marketing effort becomes in making your brand stand out and be remembered.
Coming next
Look out for the next instalment in this series where we will be discussing the role that implicit feelings play in shaping affinity towards your brand at an emotional level, and why this is pivotal to the long-term future of your brand.
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