Three decades of Ehrenberg-Bass research on distinctive brand assets explains why most refreshes erode commercial value, and the conditions under which they actually create it.
The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, based at the University of South Australia, has spent thirty years measuring how brands actually work in commercial markets. Jenni Romaniuk’s research, summarised in her book Building Distinctive Brand Assets, is unusually direct on a question many marketing teams treat as creative rather than commercial. The visual and verbal elements that buyers use to recognise a brand have measurable economic value. Changing them carelessly is the equivalent of shredding a portion of the firm’s marketing capital.
Romaniuk’s framework is straightforward. A distinctive asset is any element of identity that buyers can use to retrieve the brand from memory. Logos, colours, typography, mascots, slogans, sonic signatures, packaging shapes. The strength of an asset is measured along two dimensions. Fame, which is the share of buyers who recognise the asset and link it to the brand, and uniqueness, which is the share who link it to your brand specifically rather than a competitor. Strong distinctive assets sit high on both dimensions. Weak ones do not.
For senior leaders, the implication is direct. Distinctive assets are accumulated, slowly, through repeated exposure. They are unique to the firm in ways that ordinary trade dress is not. They produce mental availability, which Ehrenberg-Bass research links directly to market share growth. And they are destroyed, sometimes inadvertently, by refreshes that prioritise aesthetic preferences over commercial logic.
Refresh projects rarely begin with the question Ehrenberg-Bass research suggests they should. The honest version is uncomfortable: which of our distinctive assets are commercially valuable, and which is the new identity going to weaken or replace? In our experience, this question is asked properly in roughly one in ten refresh briefs we see. The other nine begin with creative ambition and reach the commercial question only after the new identity is most of the way through approval.
The pattern that follows is depressingly predictable. Buyers familiar with the previous identity stop recognising the firm in inbound contexts. The CMO, six months later, observes that brand search volume has dropped and direct traffic has fallen, and concludes that the new identity needs more support spend to land. This is technically true. The deeper truth is that the firm has just spent a meaningful sum to forfeit assets it had spent years accumulating, and is now spending again to rebuild them.
There is a second failure mode, more common in mid-sized B2B firms. The refresh is not driven by commercial logic but by internal politics. A new CEO wants to signal change. A new CMO wants to demonstrate value. A board wants the firm to look more like its larger competitors. Each is a legitimate motivation. None is a commercial argument for destroying distinctive assets. Romaniuk’s research finds that in mature markets, the firms that deliberately preserve their distinctive assets, even through other organisational change, tend to outperform those that do not.
None of this is an argument against refreshing identities. It is an argument for refreshing them when the commercial case actually supports the spend. Across the engagements we run, three conditions tend to justify a serious refresh.
The first is that the existing identity is materially constraining commercial outcomes. The website cannot scale. The visual system cannot accommodate new product lines. The proposal template cannot be produced consistently across regions. These are operating constraints, not aesthetic ones, and they tend to justify investment.
The second is that the firm has changed in ways the current identity cannot honestly represent. Through acquisition, through entry into a new sector, through a shift from product to platform. In these cases the refresh is doing strategic work, not cosmetic work, and the refresh tends to repay the investment.
The third is that the existing distinctive assets are weak on Romaniuk’s two dimensions. They are not famous, or they are not unique. The firm that finds its colour palette is shared with three competitors and its logo is recognisable to fewer than one in five buyers in its category has, genuinely, less to lose from a refresh than a firm whose assets are strong on both axes.
When none of these conditions applies, the refresh is being driven by aesthetic preference, internal politics, or a desire to look like someone else. Romaniuk’s research suggests, gently, that these are the projects most likely to destroy value. In our experience, the senior leader who can name this distinction in the brief saves their firm meaningful sums.
Translating this research into practice is, for most firms, less expensive than they fear. Three operating disciplines tend to separate the firms that protect their assets from the firms that quietly erode them.
An asset audit conducted before any refresh brief is approved. The audit names every visual and verbal element with measurable fame or uniqueness, scores each on Romaniuk’s dimensions, and flags which are commercially valuable and which are not. This document, even when imperfect, changes the conversation that follows. A refresh that proposes to abandon a strong asset has to defend the choice on commercial grounds rather than aesthetic preference.
An evolution rule, agreed at senior level, that distinctive assets evolve incrementally rather than by replacement. Strong assets are refined, never abandoned. Weak ones can be replaced. The rule is simple to state and surprisingly difficult to enforce when a creative team has fallen in love with a clean break.
A measurement discipline that tracks brand search volume, direct traffic, and unaided recall before, during, and after any refresh. The numbers are not perfect, but they are good enough to alert senior leaders when the refresh is forfeiting more than it gains. In several engagements we have run, this dashboard alone has paused refresh projects in time to save substantial spend.
If you are a CMO, ask whether your firm has ever audited its distinctive assets formally. If not, an audit is the cheapest piece of brand work available. The output is a one-page list that changes how the next refresh brief is written, and that alone can save more than the audit cost in foregone destruction.
If you are a CFO, ask the marketing leader whether brand search volume and direct traffic are tracked across any planned refresh. If not, the firm is about to invest in a project whose downside cannot be observed until the damage is done. That is a finance objection worth raising before the brief is approved.
If you are a CEO, the harder question is whether the refresh on the table is driven by commercial constraint or by a desire to mark the new chapter of leadership. Both are understandable. Only the first usually pays back. A short conversation with marketing about which distinctive assets the firm intends to protect, before the creative work begins, is the single highest-leverage intervention available.
Ready to audit your distinctive assets before the next refresh brief?
VIMI’s B2B brand design practice runs structured distinctive-asset audits for industrial,
financial, infrastructure, and enterprise technology firms. Each audit scores existing visual
and verbal assets against Ehrenberg-Bass dimensions, names which are commercially valuable,
and produces a one-page document that informs every subsequent brief. The investment is small,
the protection against accidental value destruction is large.Schedule a consultation with VIMI’s B2B brand design team at vimi.co. The first conversation is short, free, and structured.
Support growth and build stakeholder confidence with a corporate identity that communicates credibility, competence, and consistency.
