Brand Asset Fame and Uniqueness

What it is

The pair comes from a paper in the Journal of Advertising Research, published on 16 September 2014 under the title "Measuring the strength of color brand-name links: the comparative efficacy of measurement approaches". The authors describe it as a theoretically and empirically validated approach to measuring how strongly colour functions as a brand-identity element. Their test was a split-sample design with 880 consumers in three categories: banking, chocolate and hair care.

The comparison varied two things. The first was whether respondents were cued with the brand or with the colour. The second was whether they were prompted with a set of response options or answered unprompted. That produces four measurement approaches, and the main outcomes for each were the two named above. The authors conclude that the colour-cued, unprompted brand response measure is the recommended approach. In practice that means showing a respondent the colour on its own and asking which brand it brings to mind, with no list of brands to choose from.

The two measures answer different questions. Fame asks how widely a link is held, counted as the number of people who connect the brand with the colour. Uniqueness asks how exclusive the link is, counted as how often competitors are connected with the same colour. From those definitions it follows that a colour can be high on one and low on the other. A colour that many people link to a brand and few link to anyone else is both widely known and rarely shared. A colour that many people link to the brand but also to a rival is well known and not owned. These readings are drawn from the definitions, not reported from the paper's results, which this page has not seen.

The idea sits inside a larger argument. In chapter 8 of How Brands Grow (2010), Byron Sharp and Romaniuk argue that brands should build Distinctive Assets, the colours, logos, shapes and sounds that let people identify a brand instantly, because perceived meaningful differentiation is low and varies little between rivals. Fame and uniqueness are a way of putting a number on how well one such asset, a colour, is doing that identifying job.

In effect

The measure matters most where someone has to prove that a colour belongs to a brand. A court deciding a Colour Trademark asks whether buyers have come to see the colour as identifying one source, and a count of how many people link the colour to the brand and how many link it to someone else speaks to that question directly. This page does not claim that the 2014 paper was written for litigation, or that any court has used it. The abstract describes a measurement method and says nothing about law.

Earlier survey work shows what the problem looked like before this method. A 2004 master's thesis at Massey University by Amanda Pfahlert took two live trademark applications as its cases: Cadbury's application to register purple for chocolate, and the unsuccessful application by Effem Foods to register orange for Uncle Ben's rice. It compared four survey methods, namely direct association questions, a sequence of increasingly specific questions, a task matching shades to brands, and a choice-modelling experiment. All four showed a strong link between Cadbury and purple, although Cadbury was also associated with other colours. The results suggested orange was not inherently tied to Uncle Ben's. Where strong associations appeared, the methods agreed with one another, and the thesis recommended choice modelling as the most robust because it measures how a pairing affects choices and not only what respondents say they associate. The 2014 paper reaches a different recommendation, which is a reminder that there is no single settled way to count a colour link.

The other place the measure is useful is inside a company. A brand that knows its colour scores high on fame and low on uniqueness knows that part of the recognition it is paying for is shared with competitors. That reading is an application of the definitions and is the vault's, not the authors'.

What it does not say

The first limit is the evidence base. This page rests on the abstract of the 2014 paper. The abstract does not report the results for each category or approach, so it does not show how far the four methods differed or what fame and uniqueness scores any brand's colour received. Nothing here should be read as a finding about Cadbury, Coca-Cola or any other brand.

The second limit is what the measure shows about commercial value. The vault's audit of How Brands Grow found that the four tables in chapter 8 measure differentiation and not distinctiveness, and that no table in the book measures a commercial return to distinctiveness. A high fame and uniqueness score tells a brand its colour identifies it. It does not, on the evidence read, show that identification raises sales.

The third is who pays for the work. Romaniuk works at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, and the acknowledgements of How Brands Grow list the corporations that financially support the institute's research. That does not make the method wrong. It is a fact a buyer of colour-measurement services should know.

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