Established model
Distinctive brand assets
Jenni Romaniuk & Byron Sharp · 2004
The colours, shapes, sounds and characters that make a brand recognisable before its name is read.
Its place in the frameworkBrand Core›Brand Perception
What it does
Each asset is judged on two things: how many people link it to the brand, and how many link it to that brand alone. Something known but shared with a competitor is worse than useless, because the recognition it earns is spent on someone else. The strategic consequence is patience — assets are built by consistency over years and destroyed in a single rebrand.
- Reach for it when
- Before changing anything visual, and when deciding what must survive a redesign.
- Where it stops
- It measures recognition, not meaning. An asset can be perfectly distinctive and stand for nothing anyone wants.
Jenni Romaniuk & Byron Sharp, “Conceptualising and Measuring Brand Salience”, Marketing Theory, 2004.
Why it sits at Brand Perception
What people actually think, as opposed to what the organisation intended them to think — measured rather than assumed, and taken seriously when the two differ.
A model is only useful when you reach for it at the right moment. This one answers a question that arises here — so it is filed here, and nowhere else. These are the working areas it serves:
- Measuring perceptionBrand tracking practice, and the association-elicitation methods used to get at what comes to mind unprompted rather than on a scale.
- The identity–image gapKapferer on identity against image, and Hatch and Schultz on the gaps between vision, culture and image in corporate branding.
- Segment differencesThe employer-brand and internal-branding literature on the divergence between internal and external brand pictures.
- Shifting perceptionWork on belief updating and on brand repositioning, both of which find that behaviour disconfirming the old belief moves perception where messaging does not.
What it touches elsewhere
Nothing in a business is decided on its own. A conclusion reached with this model at Brand Perception lands in these other cores, whether or not anyone follows it there.
- Brand IdentityIdentity is the input to this object; the gap between the two is the finding.
- Omni CorePerception is formed at the touchpoints, which is where the experience is designed.
- Data CorePerception tracking is a longitudinal measurement and only means anything if the instrument holds still.
- Market CoreA perception reading is only interpretable against how the category and its competitors are perceived.
Filed at the same place
These answer questions that arise at Brand Perception too. Where they disagree with this one, the disagreement is the useful part.
- Mental availabilityWhat matters is not whether people like a brand but whether it comes to mind in the situations where it could be bought.
Elsewhere in Brand Core
These are other people’s models, named here so you can go to the source and use them properly. The Omnigoal is not affiliated with their authors and is not endorsed by them; nothing of theirs is reproduced here — no canvas, no diagram, no wording. Each is described in our own words, with the originator credited, because the framework is a place to put thinking, not a replacement for the people who did it. Model names and trademarks belong to their respective owners and are used here only to refer to the work itself.
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