Distinctive Brand Assets

What most people mean

“Brand identity.” Logo, colours, typography, brand guidelines PDF. Usually designed to “communicate what we do” or “reflect our values.” The brief is always: make it meaningful.

Copywriters use fountain pens as their logo. Marketing agencies use lightbulbs. Tech companies use abstract geometric shapes that supposedly represent “connectivity.” Everyone arrives at the same place.

Where the definition breaks

Research about how our brains work shows that we don’t buy things based on the meaning of a brand. You don’t hire FedEx to deliver a package because its logo has a hidden arrow. You don’t buy chocolate bars from Toblerone because the yellow mountain is actually a bear. And you didn’t choose to read this book because there’s a rooster on the cover (his name is Roger, by the way).

In other words: meaning, in and of itself, doesn’t mean shit.

When branding tries too hard to be meaningful, three things happen:

It clogs your customer’s brain. Instead of your brand popping into their head, it competes with other memories associated with the asset that have nothing to do with your category. Making it harder for customers to remember and choose you.

It makes you a copycat. If everyone in your category uses the same meaningful symbols (tools, gears, handshakes, upward arrows), you all arrive at the same place.

It goes stale. Today’s hot topic is tomorrow’s old news. Building your brand on a trend is like building a house on sand.

How we define it at STFO

Distinctive brand assets are the meaning-free bits and bobs that make your brand uniquely yours. The goal: create assets that tickle different parts of the brain without competing with all the other crap floating around in people’s heads.

Jenni Romaniuk (How Brands Grow, Part 2) advises a palette of five types:

• A colour (or combination). Virtually everyone in demolition uses black and yellow. Demo Diva went with pink.
• A logo or shape. Sticker-style graphics, mimicking the appearance of physical stickers. Not a lettermark. Not an abstract swoosh.
• Something with a face. Roger the Rooster. A French rooster with questionable fashion sense and a purple beret. Not totally meaning-free (French rooster = nationality), but very unlikely anyone else in B2B positioning will use it.
• A sound. My French accent. I used to hate it. I even tried to suppress it. Then I realised others noticed it. So I doubled down.
• A short phrase. Stand The F*ck Out. Duh.

The Demo Diva story is the purest example. Simone Bruni started a demolition business with $250 after Hurricane Katrina. Her early branding? Pink T-shirts. Then one day at the drive-thru, a cashier recognised her as “the Demo Diva.” She invested in her first pink excavator. Went all in. In an industry where everyone is faceless and uses black and yellow, she became impossible to miss.

It’s about being distinctive, not obvious. Nothing is entirely meaning-free. But explore branding elements that don’t scream what you do.

What it is NOT

• Not a logo that “represents your values” (values are internal, assets are external triggers for memory)
• Not something that needs to communicate what you do (meaning-free is the point)
• Not one thing (you need a diverse palette across colour, shape, face, sound, phrase)
• Not permanent in the first version (Roger the Rooster started as an experiment with no focus group testing)
• Not just for big brands (Demo Diva started with $250 and pink T-shirts)