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What Are Your Ownable Brand Assets?

Jamie Allebach
Jamie Allebach Chief Executive & Creative Officer

Think about your ownable brand assets that are distinctively yours, and no other brand can claim. It may be your name, logo, art, icon/symbol, personality, jingle, packaging, tagline, etc. Do you have such assets, AND, are you leveraging these assets to their fullest?

Shapes, sounds, art, and color are stored in our Semantic memory, a section of our long-term memory that processes ideas and concepts that are not drawn from our personal experiences. This is why you remember jingles heard on TV and radio, when you were a kid—I’ll bet if you heard some right now, you could sing along, and it would bring back memories of that brand. Same with brand packaging and logos.

Miller recently brought back the “Champagne of beers” jingle and saw a significant lift in sales.

This is why it’s important to leverage your distinctive brand assets in all of your marketing and advertising initiatives.

I remember when we first started working with Utz Snacks. I thought that the little “Utz Girl” on the logo and packaging was old-looking and didn’t really fit with a contemporary snack brand. I was dead wrong. After consumer testing, we discovered that people loved the Utz girl. They remember her, can easily identify packaging with her, and advertising with her reminds them to buy. And, from a branding perspective, no other snack brand can use her. This, my friends, is a distinctive, ownable brand asset.

How about Col. Sanders, Mr. Peanut, Ronald McDonald, the Pringles Chips guy, Keebler Elves, or Chef Boyardee?

Most of us could easily finish any of these jingles: “the best part of waking up…,” “I’m a Pepper, you’re a Pepper…,” “My bologna has a first name…,” “Gimme a break, gimme a break, break me off a piece of that…”

The point is, that if you have distinctive brand assets, use them to the fullest and use them consistently in your advertising. If you haven’t clearly defined or developed ownable brand assets that make you distinctive…get to work.

You owe it to your brand.