Jenni Romaniuk has been promoting her new book ‘Building Distinctive Brand Assets’ and recently appeared on @TheWriter's podcast along with Rachel Eyre, Head of Marketing at Sainsbury’s.

If you’re not already familiar with Romaniuk’s work, she is a research professor at the Ehrenberg-Bass institute and co-authored How Brands Grow Part 2 with Byron Sharp.

The book will cover a wide range of strategies, tactics and insights including how language can be distinctive and unusual words can work better in your tagline.

Romanuik elaborates, “an unusual word…a rare word, helps a tagline be a more distinctive asset. It helps the uniqueness of a tagline because they’re unusual. They get processed more distinctly in our brain and are more easily attached to something. When you have a word (like Allstate’s Mayhem) which is an unusual word it’s much easier for someone to associate specifically with a brand in their brain, rather than generically with the category.”

The book also defines the 4 commandments of brand identity which Romaniuk says include:

Choose well
Prioritise
Execution Matters (a lot)
Resist Change

On the last commandment, Romaniuk and Eyre both agreed that marketers often avoid one of the most important things for strengthening a brand; consistency.

Eyre noted that, “as marketers we change jobs very frequently and it can be very tempting to come in somewhere new and want to shake things up.”

Romaniuk concludes that one of the key benefits of a distinctive asset is getting the most out of things such as your advertising.

“Distinctive assets help you get the most out of all of the other media things you do because consumers work less hard at identifying the brand. It becomes that automatic trigger that makes that the branding process easier.”

The book is due out in July and you can listen to the full interview below.

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