Exploring the uniqueness of distinctive brand assets within the UK automotive industry

Distinctive brand assets, such as logos, fonts, and jingles, help strengthen the link between a brand and its marketing communications, which is pivotal to anchoring any message to the right mental structures of category buyers. However, budget and time constraints mean that brand managers can only effectively build and own a limited number of assets, heightening the need for guidance on selecting the most valuable ones to invest in. The only exhaustive paper on the topic revealed that logos, logotypes, and characters offer the best opportunities for ownership in FMCG categories. We extend these findings to the automotive industry, a first in a high-involvement product category, and replicate the Competitive Intensity formula used in this contribution to enable comparison. Results of testing 44, in-market and de-branded assets show that logo is the most uniquely ownable asset type. Fonts, slogans, and colours all emerge as having Low Uniqueness Concentration. The dispersion of competitive intensity within asset types varies in line with their uniqueness concentration, raising the importance of creative execution and consistent usage to develop a sufficiently high level of unique ownership. Finally, we observed neither gender nor generational differences in the uniqueness scores, nor in the dispersion of competitive intensity.