Harnessing the power of Distinctive Brand Assets

If you work in design or marketing, you’ll have noticed a new acronym has sidled into town. DBA, anyone? It stands for Distinctive Brand Asset – and it seems to be everywhere at the moment. But are DBAs really a new thing?

Quick overview. If you don’t know what we’re talking about, Distinctive Brand Assets are the small handful of select branding assets (everything from logo and fonts or shapes and colour) that a brand should use consistently to make them really distinct in the world.  

No one’s doubting that DBAs are a good thing but isn’t this exactly what good design and good designers have been doing for generations already?

Steve Bewick, Creative Director on Pilsner Urquell and Kozel beer, argues: “When creating or evolving a brand identity, it’s always been the designer’s job to think about what a brand stands for and how it can be both distinct from its competitors and memorable for its consumers. That means crafting a few powerful and eye-catching assets that capture the essence or story of each brand.”

“Sometimes a brand may ‘collect’ too many assets over the years – so we might have to streamline their library, stripping out any that might not be working hard enough. The skill is striking the right balance between having enough assets to paint a visually rich and relevant brand world but not having so many that things get cluttered and complex.”

So what is a good example of a DBA? There are plenty to pick from. The trick to being truly distinctive is how instantly you associate it with a brand. For example, what brand owns a yellow curvy M shape? What high-flying brand do you associate with the colour orange? What brand do you think of when you see a prancing horse? Or a meerkat? Can you hum the noise a Mac makes when it starts up? Then that’s a DBA.

(Answers: McDonald’s, EasyJet, Ferrari, Comparethemarket.com)

Johnnie Walker is a good global example too. Essentially, they’ve got four key assets: the square bottle, the diagonal label shape, the striding man icon and the Keep Walking strapline. Used together or separately, they evoke the Scotch whisky powerfully. Helped by the fact they’ve been brutally consistent for decades.

Kozel, a Czech beer we evolved the identity for recently, is a more modern example – the ambition is to stick to a DBA family that includes a goat icon, the crafted logotype and a distinct ‘village’ illustration style for years to come.

But having a limited number of DBAs doesn’t mean limiting creativity or becoming a minimalist brand. It just means being stricter and more consistent with the assets you have. Not all Johnnie Walker ads or activations are the same – yet they all use the same assets.  

Creatives can still be creative and consumers can still be engaged. Take Hendrick’s Gin, for example. They own the cucumber among other key DBAs, but you don’t always see it presented in the same way. Sometimes it’s illustrated in their Victorian style. Other times it’s an activation, like ‘the world’s most adored cucumber’, on display in over 50 airports. You might even have spotted a giant flying cucumber dirigible in the sky over the years. And of course, you enjoy a slice of real cucumber with a perfect serve. So it’s still distinctive – but never dull!

“At the end of the day. it’s really all about recall and recognition”, says Steve. “By using your brand assets consistently, across all channels, a brand can quickly get known for an icon or colour or sound or all of them. But if you have too many assets, that brand landscape becomes blurred, so you won’t get recognised instantly.”

This is even more important when we consider that the world is becoming smaller and smaller – with more people travelling to more locations – so seeing the same things in different places becomes paramount. Media plays a big role too. DBAs are nothing without media – beyond the product itself, comms is the only way to get your brand assets in front of your audience in the right way.

DBAs might be a new way of stratgically thinking about a brand’s armoury of assets – like applying a design filter – but the wider idea of only using a few carefully-chosen brand assets everywhere has been a long-held branding philosophy.

“What’s been good about the recent DBA focus and thinking”, says Steve, “is that it’s focused everyone’s minds on the discipline of deconstructing and sharply defining a brand’s core assets. It’s something we naturally do as designers I think. Of listing assets out and being honest about what should be upweighted in the future and what perhaps should be consigned to history. It’s a process that has and will bring about some tough decisions within brand and creative teams. But hopefully the result will be some brands that will stand the test of time – ones that in the future will combine iconic and ownable assets that are used consistently in all media to create instant recall with consumers."