What are your distinctive brand assets?

Speaking of a great food experience, I was reminded the other day how much I enjoyed the distinctive salty and flowery taste of month old Play-Doh during my formative years. What jogged my memory was reading how Hasbro had successfully trademarked the smell of their popular brand.

How does that even work?

Apparently, in order to trademark a smell you need to be able to describe it. Hasbro formally describes the scent as “a unique combination of a sweet, slightly musky, vanilla-like fragrance, with slight overtones of cherry, and the natural smell of a salted, wheat-based dough”.

I have spent my lifetime around wine-heads, but that just about takes the biscuit! I bet it made for an interesting workshop, working out that spiel.

It does, however, reinforce a great point about distinctive and own-able brand assets. If someone can describe it, then you have come a long way towards it being unique. A key acronym amongst industry types these days is to chirp on about DBAs or Distinctive Brand Assets. In essence, DBAs touch on many areas of your brand identity. This includes (but not limited to) areas such as logos, fonts, colour, sound, texture, form, tag-lines, product, brand characters, tone of voice, celebrity endorsers, and taste - a big one for the food industry.

It has been said that if one can be blind folded, fed your product and then accurately guess your brand, you’re in a great starting spot. You see, we are simple folk deep down. We look for consistent sensory and semantic cues that shortcut us to identify and interact with a brand and recall it. Creating and building distinctive brand assets across all touch-points is core to the DNA of thriving brands.

It’s simple. Distinctive Brand Assets can drive brand growth by creating stronger emotional links to packaging, advertising, company, brand mission and even why you exist. Most importantly they make a brand more familiar, easier to find and ultimately the reason to repeat purchase.

One of the first projects that knocked on the door after setting up The Creative Method was Guzman Y Gomez. We worked closely with Steven Marks creating and building the branding of the Mexican food chain for the Australian market. Branding 101 would probably claim you can’t call a chain of Mexican restaurants a name that people can’t pronounce, but the power of creating strong distinctive brand assets meant that people could describe it, “It’s the two yellow and black guys”. You know you’ve won the hearts of the Aussie consumer when your name gets shortened to ‘‘Guzzies’’ or ‘GYG’.

Adding to the distinctiveness and uniqueness that is Guzman Y Gomez is the fact that you are served in the most part by South Americans or Latinos. How bright and friendly is their culture?! It not only reinforces trust and authenticity, but they make you feel good. This is at the heart of great brands - it’s how they make you feel that counts. We all want to be loved and to love those that we feel the most comfortable with.

So ask yourselves a few questions. What are your distinctive brand assets? What is it that you can own? What do you have that can be easily described? Build your Distinctive Brand Assets and chances are that you will be a more successful and lasting brand.

I’m off to buy some Play Doh for lunch.