The risk of overconfidence in distinctive brand assets

The baseline competency of any advert must be brand recognition. If your audience doesn’t link your brand to the ad message, it ceases to be an advert for your brand. At best, it’s seen as an ad for the category. At worst, it’s mistaken for a competitor brand.

Some advertising channels are a little more forgiving when it comes to getting this task right. For example, a 30-second TV ad provides a good window of opportunity to secure a brand link both visually (by displaying the brand) and audibly (by voicing the brand name).

With channels like out-of-home (OOH), you’ve got to work that bit harder, maximising your 1.9 seconds of visual attention (according to 2023 Lumen data) to ensure that, at the very least, your ad is anchored back to brand.

One of the most common ways to ensure we’re anchoring back to brand is to include direct brand signals in the form of a brand name, used either alone or in conjunction with a logo (as outlined in research by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute’s Jenni Romaniuk and Nicole Hartnett). Unlike other brand elements, such as signs and symbols, which require viewers to actively link assets back to brand, direct brand signals leave no room for error.

However, when it comes to poster design, it seems this highly valuable asset takes a back seat. Clear Channel recently reviewed over 3,000 posters spanning 11 major categories and found that, on average, less than 3% of creative space was given over to direct brand signals – the most certain way of anchoring back to brand and it’s been resigned to little more than a footnote.

Of course, before we even get the chance to create a brand link, we must first capture someone’s attention – something that’s perhaps not best achieved by simply filling your poster with a brand logo.

One way to secure both brand linkage and attention is to make the most of your distinctive brand asset ‘palette’ – a technique that’s being employed more and more in poster design.

A brilliant example is Guinness (see below). Whilst it doesn’t directly feature the brand name, the use of distinctive brand assets (the iconic pint and the harp logo) make the brand the central part of the advert. Meanwhile, the faint glint of sunshine serves to link brand to category entry point: ‘Guinness, a refreshing summer pint.’

Whether you’re passing this kind of message on foot at 3mph or in a car at 30mph, the merest of glances should ensure you’re anchoring back to brand.

However, if you’re going to sacrifice brand and logo space for distinctive assets, then you’ve got to be confident that your audience can link your asset back to brand. If that’s not the case, and your brand name is hidden away in its allocated 3% of the space, then you might be in trouble.

For example, this ad for Müller Corner. It’s a visually stunning ad, worthy of the many accolades it received, but can we really be confident enough in this distinctive asset to reduce the brand name and logo to the 1.5% of available space it occupies? Could this ad have been improved?

Checking your asset strength

Curious to understand a little more about the Müller ad, I put it through its paces by adopting the asset measurement approach outlined by Romaniuk, in her seminal work Building Distinctive Brand Assets.

For this, we removed the brand name from the ad (in this case, leaving us with just the asset in the form of the product shot) and asked 1,000 category buyers to identify the brand based on this stimulus.

The resulting data provides two important metrics:

Fame: quantifies the percentage of category buyers’ brains where the brand has a salient link to the asset, i.e. they can correctly guess the brand from the stimulus.

Uniqueness: quantifies the brand’s level of ownership of the asset versus competitor brands by accounting for the number of ‘wrong’ guesses.

Based on these results, assets can then be placed into a distinctive asset grid to understand their potential:

On the surface, Müller’s asset appears to be more than fit for purpose, with a fame score of 67% and a uniqueness score of 69%, putting it firmly in the ‘use or lose’ box.

However, when we break this down further to look at brand buyers vs non-buyers, the story does change a little.

As you might expect, fame and uniqueness among brand buyers increases (their product use and increased propensity to engage with advertising for the brand doing a good job of refreshing brand links). However, comparatively, our non-brand buyers don’t look anywhere near as strong. The asset does still sneak into the top-right of our asset grid, but only just.

Think of this another way: upon seeing this brand asset, over 40% of non-brand buyers (a key audience for growth) are unable to link it back to Müller, and all we have to fall back on for brand recognition is the 1.5% of this poster dedicated to direct branding.

While it’s true that a picture does have an intrinsic tendency to capture attention, as this massive Müller product shot undoubtedly does, evidence from eye tracking research by Michel Pieters and Rik Wedel shows that attention to pictures does not result in a significant increase in attention to the brand.

In the interest of fairness, we also put the Guinness ad through the same asset test and it excelled, scoring at least 90% for both fame and uniqueness across both brand buyers and non-buyers.

Concerns over direct branding

It’s perhaps no surprise that so many OOH ads minimise direct brand signals. Press has a history of producing similar ads, and many OOH advertisers still simply replicate their press ad on a poster site.

The rationale behind reducing direct branding in print advertising is to minimise the ad avoidance that stems from the audience’s (supposed) inherent dislike of advertising. Advertising practitioners have suggested that, by disguising ads to look like editorial content, you can essentially trick the unsuspecting reader into engaging with the ad (see Jim Aitchison’s 1999 book Cutting Edge Advertising).

However, this kind of thinking doesn’t appear to match up with evidence Hartnett published in 2011, which suggests that the presence of direct branding has little impact on ad liking in press advertising. Similarly, research from Romaniuk and Hartnett relating to TV advertising proves that the size of direct branding does not significantly influence ad liking.

Curious to see how the Müller ad would fare with a little extra direct branding, I tested four versions of the ad, each with a different proportion of ad space dedicated to the brand name/logo. Respondents were each shown one version of the ad and asked to rate the degree to which they liked the ad on a five-point scale.

The results showed no significant difference in the likability between executions:

Evidence from Pieters and Wedel shows that increasing the size of the brand element will increase the likelihood of it gaining attention. So, while Müller’s creative genius should certainly be applauded, it does appear that there was an opportunity to increase the chance of brand linkage, with no negative effect on overall ad liking.

Next steps

More work is required to establish exactly how much direct branding is needed to support a distinctive brand asset for optimum ad and brand recall in OOH. That’s an area we’re currently looking at with Mike Follett at Lumen Research, the results of which we’ll release in early 2025. But, for now at least, I would always err on the side of caution. If in doubt, call the brand out.

Lindsay Rapacchi is research and insight director at Clear Channel UK.