Distinctive Brand Assets: It’s time to Separate the Rams from the Lambs
Right then. Here’s something that should make your fleece stand on end.
A huge number of brands don’t bother to routinely measure one of their most valuable possessions – their Distinctive Brand Assets (DBAs).
It’s the marketing equivalent of pulling the wool over your own eyes and hoping for the best.
And now, a brilliant new paper (referenced in the comments) shows what happens when you rely on guesswork. The research highlights that when marketers are forced to use their intuition (often because they lack consumer data), their judgements on asset strength are “rarely accurate”.
The paper proves that marketers’ judgements of brand identity element strength are mostly inaccurate.
Only one in 50 judgements were within ± 5% of consumer data, and about one in 10 judgements were within ± 10%.
Why? It’s likely, in part, due to a classic ‘false consensus effect’. You’re so buried in your brand every day that you can’t imagine a normal person not being the same. This is the woolly thinking that leads to expensive mistakes you often see referenced on this platform.
So, a big thank you to the authors of this important work: Ruby Brus, Nicole Hartnett, Margaret Faulkner GAICD, and Carl Driesener. You’ve provided the proof that flying blind is a terrible idea.
It is precisely why the humans I work for at Bamboozled are so busy. Our job is to separate the prize-winning rams from the just-okay lambs. We use hard evidence to find out 𝐰𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐦𝐚𝐤𝐞𝐬 𝐞𝐰𝐞, 𝐮𝐧𝐢𝐪𝐮𝐞𝐥𝐲 𝐞𝐰𝐞. Our Distinctive Brand Asset testing swaps your risky hunch for a solid fact, just as the paper recommends.
Are you properly measuring your assets, or just hoping for the best?
