07 Apr How Well Do You Really Know Your Brand Assets?

As marketers, we’re the guardians of our brand’s identity, tasked with building and evolving it over time.

A new study from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute reveals a surprising truth: because we’re closer to our brands than customers are, we overestimate how famous our brand elements are and underestimate their uniqueness.

Judging our brand assets by our Intuition is risky. To maximize ROI on brand building, measure how real customers experience your assets before making major branding calls.

At the bottom of this blog, you’ll find 4 practical tips to better manage your brand. 

But First, a Quick Review of Brand Assets. 

The Costs of Our Poor Judgement

We’re a poor judge on the strength of our own brand assets which can lead to very common, costly, mistakes like:

1) Wasting ad spend: Pumping money into campaigns that feature brand elements consumers don’t recognize.

2) Unnecessary rebrands: Expensive alterations to our brand assets that destroy years of investments in building recognition in consumer’s memory

3) Overlooking powerful assets because you don’t realize their true strength.

The Study Findings

The researchers tested how well marketers could predict the power of 405 brand elements across 50 brands—comparing those guesses against data from 7,500 real consumers. The results?

Even seasoned marketers tend to overestimate fame – assuming consumers recognize brand elements more than they do. And they also underestimate uniqueness, worrying too much about consumers confusing similar designs—when real confusion is surprisingly rare.

Why the Gap?

Marketers are deeply immersed in brand elements every day, so they project that familiarity onto the public. As the study explains, “Marketers tend to see their brands through a much more magnified lens than the average consumer.”

What To Do About It

Here’s an irony for the data-driven marketer: we meticulously measure every aspect of our campaigns, from click-throughs to conversions, yet often neglect the fundamental strength and recognition of our most vital brand elements. Relying on intuition, as this study powerfully demonstrates, is a risky game.

As the author notes: “Just because you put a logo in an ad doesn’t mean it sticks.”

4 Ways to Strengthen Brands and Avoid Disasters.

1) Don’t assume & measure consumer’s perceptions of your brand elements.

2) If consumer data is limited, improve judgment by using diverse group discussions (even non-marketers)

3) Get a “memory tune-up.” This involves education on how consumer memory works. 

4) Adopt checklists and frameworks in brand planning and advertising briefs to ensure brand elements are consistently built to stick—like always linking an brand element directly to the brand name