Everywhere we look, the world is full of visual stimuli. As a result, our brains have evolved to drive our attention to things that move or stand out from their surroundings. Neuroscientists call this “visual saliency.”
This process is automatic and pre-attentive – our brains innately react to these triggers, even before we even pay attention to them. This is likely an evolutionary trait that aided early humans, for example, in spotting moving predators or finding fruit in trees.
Today, among an “explosion of everything,” brands need immediate recognition. They need to stand out from the crowd and maximize their salience, or mental availability, when consumers are prompted with a relevant need. But how can they best achieve this in practice and gain an advantage against the competition?
One way is to establish simple mental shortcuts, or brand assets. We define a brand asset as “a mental shortcut to a brand that activates existing memories related to communications or previous brand experience.” It can be a logo, a unique pack, a tagline, or a celebrity.
Brand Imprint – a tool to measure distinctive assets
Brand Imprint measures the impact of branding elements like these. Some assets work harder than others in driving brand salience, and our approach identifies what those assets are.
Our brains are lazy. They account for only 4% of our body mass but consume 20% of our energy. So, brains make every effort to conserve energy using System 1, or largely effortless thinking, to navigate the world. In other words, they try to avoid the conscious effort involved in System 2. As a result, the most effective assets operate via the more influential System 1 and help the brand stand out and win at the point of purchase.
Our Brand Imprint tool allows us to capture both System 1 and System 2 thought processing in response to brand assets. We do this by measuring the time-based responses of consumers after exposure to each asset. Our methodology produces three diagnostic scores for each asset based on how famous, distinctive, and intuitive each asset is:
BrandZ + Brand Imprint
We also conducted another large study on Brand Imprint, covering eight markets and more than 200 brands, using 10,500 interviews and more than 1,300 brand cues. We did this along with a BrandZ study so that we can look specifically at the strength of various brand assets across several markets. The chart below shows the top 10 US brands with the highest Brand Imprint.
The Top 3 brands – Disney, Coca-Cola, and McDonalds - stand out on all three components and regularly feature as part of our Kantar BrandZ Most Valuable Global Brands ranking. So, what can we learn from how they have managed to build such strong imprints?
All three adhere to the three key principles of strong brand assets by delivering clarity, consistency, and communication to consumers within their full brand Imprint:
- Clarity. Assets with clarity are the most effective, connecting simple colors, design and phrasing.
- Consistency. This involves deployment over time, across media channels and products. Brands with a clear asset heritage should also draw on it freely.
- Communication. Brands that are able to reinforce relevant communications with their assets gain an additional advantage in influencing consumers at key decision points.
All three of our top performers deploy great clarity, using clear and simple asset construction with connected colors and phrasing across numerous components, including their fonts, logos, slogans, and color schemes. For example, we can see the consistent use of black by Disney, red by Coca-Cola, and red and yellow by McDonald’s across all assets.
They are also very consistent in how they deploy their assets over time, across media channels, and in their specific products. Consistency reinforces memory structures. The more repetition you experience across different touchpoints, the stronger your memory structures become. This can involve both explicit and implicit uses of brand cues, including how the contours of Micky are used with the color black, how the red bottle of Coca Cola appears without a brand name, and how a McDonald’s box displays the brand and logo below a burger, which says much more than just the brand name and yet reminds people of the brand multiple times. This is excellent creative execution that engages the brain, especially since our brains love novelty and solving puzzles.
Our final pillar is communication. All three brands communicate aspects of their intended marketing message using their key assets. Disney often deploys the Mickey logo as a reminder of the fun and magic behind the brand. Coke used its color scheme and bottle shapes as part of their “Open happiness” campaign. McDonald’s used its instantly recognizable fries and color scheme to land messages around Wi-Fi, a film promotion, and the brand's 60th anniversary.
In summary, a strong imprint boosts brand equity by increasing salience and equates to greater brand value and growth prospects. Strong brand assets benefit from clarity, consistency, and communication in reinforcing the brand message
To learn more about Brand Imprint, watch the on-demand webinar “Brand Imprint: Building your distinctive assets for success.”
View our full Kantar BrandZ 2024 Most Valuable Canadian Brands report here