The brief about distinctiveness
Today we discuss distinctiveness. The thing that decides whether all that work on visibility is building your brand, or just feeding a feed.
If I can lift content from your site and place it on a competitor’s with no notable edits, and nothing looks out of place, that piece should have never been published. Irrespective of how many sessions it generated. Irregardless of how many likes it received.
Visibility alone is not enough. Clicks alone are not enough. Interaction alone is not enough. Showmanship can capture attention, but you need distinctiveness to connect the content back to the brand. Otherwise, the brand-building power is largely lost. Only engagement associated with the brand strengthens salience.
Commodity content is a bigger issue than AI Mode
With AI Overviews and AI Mode, search is getting simultaneously more crowded and more anonymous. Words blended into one answer. Many marketers are fighting to win citations in the misguided hope of clicks.
But when you are fighting to appear for informational searches, the chance of a click is less than 1% (Pew Research Center). So we expand to Discover, News, socials. Go click-hunting. And miss the point. It was never about clicks.
Say you do land that user. If the page is commodity content, what’s the value?
The goal was never sessions. The goal was to have the user read the piece and leave with a positive feeling that is associated back to your brand.
But in most cases, the brand is never noticed.
Because yes, every webpage has a logo in the header. And eye tracking studies show it is seen upon page load. But a peripheral glance does not brand awareness make. A Nielsen Norman Group study showed, even with best-practice UX, on average 61% of users couldn’t recall the brand from the header logo. Alone, it is not enough.
What if we strip it? Look at the pages below. What brands do they belong to? Can you instantly name all three?
This should be easy. You’re looking at content from some of the most well-known fitness brands in the world. But without the header logo, I bet you’re lost on all except maybe one. That is the problem with commoditisation.
These articles aren’t bad. They aren’t AI slop. They are just…replaceable.
The reader will get their information. Your brand won’t get the payoff. That’s the cost of commoditisation. If the work could belong to anyone, it builds the category, not your brand.
Your Google dashboards can’t see the problem
Most of us ship content daily: blog articles, product pages, landing pages, videos, social posts.
We assess its effectiveness through the lens of Google Search Console or GA4. Looking at impressions, clicks, average position, sessions, conversions. Without acknowledging the visual contexts in which the content competes for attention.
I was brought onto a case where branded search clicks had been inexplicably decreasing. No changes in impressions, no loss of position, just a sudden drop in clicks. It took me five minutes to solve what had plagued the team for weeks. A developer had accidentally removed the favicon.
Branding matters.
If you see old logos, incorrect naming, the absence of clear identification. Fix it.
AI assistants are becoming the front door to the internet. Understand what AI Mode, Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude and more say about your business… and your competitors.
See your AI share of search, uncover what’s driving AI recommendations, and understand how AI bots interact with your website with Scrunch.
Building a distinctive brand
Your job is to make content stand out across digital surfaces.
That way, on the scrolling shelf of Google Shopping, you won’t be one more golden bottle on a wall of off-white, but bring brand with colour. On Google Maps won’t blend in with every other bar, but show your style. In the short video carousel, you be the clip nobody can name, but engage with brand asset rich thumbnails.
The best brands don’t rely on a single branding moment. They use additional non-name elements, known as distinctive brand assets, that can act as a substitute for the brand name.
Logos, taglines, colours, characters, symbols, styles, sounds, packaging (as seen in product photos). All of these can become shorthand that supports quick brand recognition.
Although not all are equally effective. System1’s data points to characters and sonic cues being the most memorable. Yet most brands don’t have either of these.
Now, the decision on which of these to invest in establishing is often out of the control of digital, but how they are used online is squarely in your court.
Run a digital brand health check
First, fix the basics Google relies on. Check your:
Site name: Official brand name
Knowledge graph entity: Also official brand name
Favicon: Crisp, clear, current SVG logo
Organization schema: Logo provided in square and, if relevant, horizontal formats
OG images: 1200×675px intentional imagery, branded in the bottom left
Or better, refer a colleague or industry friend and I’ll send you a brand health check analysis for one domain.
This ensures your branding basics of name and logo are correctly represented across all critical surfaces.
But the best brands understand that digital attention spans are measured in milliseconds. Distinctiveness isn’t as simple as slapping the brand name and logo on everything. Rapid recognition is a competitive advantage. So they cultivate noticeability with a palette of distinctive assets.
Map the assets you have in your arsenal and understand how they are currently applied. Then on every critical surface, strip the logo and name and see what’s left. If it could belong to anyone, it’s building the category, not your brand.
So, we know how to grab attention with Showmanship. And how to convert that to brand salience with Distinctiveness. The next step, growing reach with Distribution is the topic for next month’s newsletter.
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That’s it for this brief.
Till next month,
- Jes