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Recently, my subscribers quadrupled without me writing a single word. That’s when it occurred to me many of you don’t know much about me.

Before a few months ago, most of you knew me from LinkedIn and podcast appearances on Let’s Talk Branding and JUST Branding. And a random article I wrote about LinkedIn horseshit after a 3-year social media hiatus.

But Substack tells me that funnel has shifted. Three-quarters of you found me through my article, Design Has a “Brand Strategy” Problem, or because Substack recently developed a habit of recommending my newsletter to its newest, most unsuspecting members.

Before I get into my story, let me shamelessly plug myself.

How I Can Help Your Brand

I help brands with naming and designing core distinctive assets: brand names, logos, mascots, package structures, jingles, sonic logos, taglines, color—you name it. If I can’t execute something myself, I’ll help you find the right idea and direct someone who can.

Asset Design

Naming

My approach differs from most. I don’t deal in pseudoscience—no color psychology, brand archetypes, or Maslow’s hierarchy. No week-long “design sprints” or “brand strategy workshops.” I look for inspiration everywhere except your category.

If you’re ready to build a more distinctive brand—or your agency is looking for a creative mind to join the team—let's talk about the right opportunity.

My philosophy and approach is explained in detail throughout the following three articles: Design Has a “Brand Strategy” Problem, Where “Meaning-Free Distinctiveness” Jumped the Shark, and Category-Defiant Distinctiveness in Action.*

If any of this resonates, you know where to find me.

Where to Find Me

Now—onto my story, and my secret weapon: ADHD.

I’ve Been on a Life-Long Hunt For Two Things: Truth & Beauty

Throughout most of my life, two of the three “transcendentals” have driven me: Truth and Beauty. I’ve only stumbled upon Goodness along the way.

First, Beauty. I’ve always been a creative. I spent half of high school in a TV production class, studied film in college, I’ve written music since I was a freshman in college, and I taught myself graphic design in 2016.

I’ve been interested in advertising for as long as I can remember. I even admired Darren’s job as an advertiser in Bewitched as a kid watching “Nick at Night.”

Right before I graduated college in 2011, I began taking my Catholic faith seriously for the first time—and Truth took over.

What pulled me in wasn’t beauty—which had been largely hollowed out of the U.S. Church in the 1970s as architects traded sacred art for a secular minimalism prescribed in a booklet called Environment and Art in Catholic Worship. It was my contrarian nature, combined with my upbringing as a nominal Catholic that pulled me in.

The most contrarian thing you can do in Arkansas is to either be an atheist or a Catholic. Protestant-Catholic hate there isn’t Northern Ireland in the 70s, but reveal your dark secret to a coworker and you’ll be condemned for idolatry on the spot.

After a series of events and friendships pushed me deeper into my faith, I grabbed every apologetics book I could find and discovered an intellectual side I never knew I had. Contrary to popular belief, reason is a central tenet of Catholicism. Each doctrine has been rigorously refined over two millennia by some of history’s most formidable intellectual minds.

By graduation, I’d lost interest in filmmaking and moved to Madison, Wisconsin. My first career was in ministry—four years traveling the country, consulting Catholic ministry staff and mentoring college students in prayer and virtue. Eventually I was tapped to handle all media for the nonprofit, re-learning filmmaking and teaching myself graphic design along the way.

Promotional videos were simple enough: travel the country, film people crying about how impactful we were—from a 70-year-old Oklahoma farmer to a Florida sorority girl.

But when asked to design a brand from scratch for a new online resource, I was lost. I can’t just show people crying in a logo. I had to figure out how brand design attracts users.

That’s when my background in apologetics and beauty collided with branding. Instead of obsessing over which theological arguments to deploy, I became obsessed with how design actually drives brand growth.

Initially, I turned to the obvious influencers—Chris Do, Marty Neumeier, Seth Godin, Simon Sinek, Donald Miller, even Gary Vee. Bought it all hook, line, and sinker. Used it to design my first brand.

Despite swimming in bullshit, it was still pretty damn distinctive.

I loved every minute of it. So much so, I quit ministry, struck out on my own, and pursued a career in identity design. But, my insecurity lingered and I was hungry for truth. I was terrified of designing a brand for a client that would turn around and fail them.

So, I got a library card and eventually stumbled upon a very unsexy white rabbit offline.

The Marketing Science Rabbit Hole

The book jacket is aggressively bad. Like, criminally bad. And yet, I picked up How Brands Grow anyway. That cover might be the sole reason most designers never stumble into marketing science. Designers aren’t putting early-2000s WordArt aesthetics on the bookshelf in their Zoom backgrounds.

Once you get past the cover, Sharp’s ideas will rearrange your brain.

How Brands Grow is the antidote to Start with Why. Customers rarely “buy your why.” They don’t buy your story, your hustle, your “gut feeling,” or your 1,000-comments-a-day Instagram grind. They buy what’s familiar. They buy what they can find.

The contrarian in me was delighted.

How Brands Grow suggested brands must be designed for the most distracted brain in the room. Which happens to be me.

ADHD is a Disability, But a Useful One for Designers

I’m not going to tell you ADHD is a superpower. It’s a learning disability. I’m medicated for it. It has cost me plenty. But for brand identity designers and advertisers, there are advantages worth talking about.

It starts with an idea I’ve internalized since watching the documentary Objectified in 2019, but have never written about until recently. An idea stolen from physical product design: “designing for the extremes.”

When designing a vegetable peeler, you design the handle for someone with severe arthritis and a master chef. The product ends up working well for everyone in between.

In brand identity, designing for the extremes means designing for the most distracted brain in the room—and for design peers, marketers, and category enthusiasts who scrutinize every pixel. Nail both ends, and your brand works for everyone in between.

My ADHD puts me firmly at one of those extremes. And it’s taught me something I don’t think even the marketing science crowd has fully reckoned with yet.

Recently, I’ve started noticing that my peers—and even seasoned marketing scientists—frequently rate brands as distinctive when they aren’t, and praise advertising that teases the brand out until the end. For example, System1 Group has held up the 2025 Lay’s Super Bowl ad as a masterclass in brand codes.* The Lay’s brand didn’t appear until 43 seconds in…

The problem is that System1 is testing ads in an isolated lab setting with viewers’ full attention, then asking them soon after what brand was advertised. That’s not how most advertising is experienced. Most advertising is experienced while distracted. While scrolling. While arguing with your kids. While doing literally anything else.

ADHD has complicated a lot of my life, but not my design work. It’s clarified it. But ADHD isn't the only thing that's put me at an extreme most designers never occupy. My Catholic faith also allows me to design for the extremes.

*Admittedly, Lay’s is far more synonymous with potatoes than anyone else, which likely explains why the fluency scores for this ad were unusually high when the only clues to the brand or category are yellow boots and a potato. However, unless you hold total market dominance and are airing during the Super Bowl—where audience engagement is at its peak—I wouldn't recommend relying on such subtle cues before revealing your brand.

How My Catholic Faith Helps Me “Design for the Extremes” and Reach All Category Buyers

Byron Sharp’s How Brands Grow is a mandate for radical reach: if you want to scale, you have to talk to everyone—especially the people who barely know you exist. Most marketers fail at this because they are trapped in a cultural bubble. I’ve found my escape hatch in a 2,000-year-old "design for the extremes" framework that is stubbornly non-partisan: my Catholic faith.

Catholicism is not tied to a single political ideology. I’ve heard it said that Jesus was the most conservative person to have ever lived and the most liberal.

Jesus explicitly condemned extramarital sex. He located the root of evil in the human heart, not in systems or structures. He wasn’t “inclusive” or “tolerant” in any modern therapeutic sense—he declared that no one comes to the Father except through him. He didn’t traffic in “your truth” or “my truth.” He claimed, with unsettling directness, to be the truth. And he preached radical forgiveness—something cancel culture, on both the left and the right, has made its business to destroy.

But he also confounds the other side completely. He rejected what we’d now recognize as core MAGA commitments: cruel treatment of immigrants, the idol of personal liberty over the common good, an appetite for punishment, nationalism. He ate with prostitutes. He preached a preferential option for the poor and powerless. He told a rich young man to sell everything. He boldly proclaimed you have to lose your life to find it. To turn the other cheek.

To put it frankly, JD Vance is a bad Catholic. And so is Joe Biden. But, so am I half the time. The Church doesn’t fit on a bumper sticker. Which is exactly why it’s useful to me as a designer who dabbles in advertising.

I’ve spent my career straddling two worlds that don’t talk to each other: predominantly conservative, working-class communities in two different states, and the left-leaning, intellectually insular world of professional marketing. Most people in my industry only ever live in one of those worlds. That’s a problem, because your category buyers live in both.

That vantage point is why I can see “social purpose” campaigns for what they usually are: tone deaf and exclusive. It’s why I notice that Cannes Lions darlings couldn’t sell to a broad category buyer if their lives depended on it. It’s why I watch “dopamine design” alienate buyers outside a small trend-chasing demographic while designers congratulate each other.

And it’s why I stopped taking seriously the Gen Z surveys claiming that the vast majority of young consumers “fight for justice” and buy brands that share their values. I’ve watched my 20-year-old nephew laugh at TikTok videos of Joe Biden falling down stairs and my niece buy from Shein as a broke high school student. You are living in a fantasy if you think a generation raised on social media is more virtuous when they aren’t chasing likes online.

Designing for all category buyers means you can’t live inside one tribe. My faith—stubbornly and inconveniently unclaimed by either party, that simultaneously lives in the extremes of both—has kept me from doing that.

I started this newsletter trying to help brands “attract the customer of their dreams.” The dream customer. The ideal buyer. The one who gets you.

It took a library card, a learning disability, and my Catholic faith to teach me the real job: reach everyone else too.

Okay. Enough brand design talk.

I figured some of you might want to know more about me beyond my career. So, I’ll use the end of this article as an excuse to resurrect my Myspace page from college, but with updated favorites and stripped of drunken pictures of myself.

My Favorite Things:

Favorite People: My wife and two daughters.

Favorite Musicians (along with links to my favorite songs of theirs)- Son Lux, M83, Miles Davis, Bon Iver, Elliot Smith, Sufjan Stevens, The Antlers (their concept album, Hospice), Andrew Bird, The Arctic Monkeys, Colour Revolt (I got to interview them and filmed this impromptu concert in a green room for a college TV show), Dr. Dog, Explosions in the Sky, Sigur Ros, Gregory Alan Isakov, The Postal Service, Wolf Parade

Favorite Films - Narrative: Jaws, The Departed, The Shining, In Bruges, Seven Psychopaths, It’s a Wonderful Life, Whiplash, Rear Window, No Country for Old Men, North by Northwest, The Exorcist, Her, The Birds, Stepbrothers, Submarine

Documentaries: The Act of Killing, Paradise Lost, Man on Wire, Waiting for Superman, Won’t You Be My Neighbor, Life in a Day

Favorite Brands - These are the brands I might purchase new offerings from without second thought: Output (music software), A24 (film studio), Bob Hoffman (does a person count?), Ehrenberg-Bass Institute.

And the brands I respect for their marketing and identity design: Geico, State Farm, Pringles, Dunkin, Pirateship.com, Liquid Death (even as a LinkedIn contrarian I gotta respect what they’re doing).

And the only brands I would say I’m “in love with” and “identify with”: the Catholic Church, Franke’s Cafeteria (my family’s restaurant which closed in 2020 after 101 years).

Favorite Saints - Maria Goretti (radical forgiveness), Ignatius of Loyola (practical spiritual advice), John Paul II (an intellectual powerhouse and lover of Beauty), Joseph (an example of a father, husband, and worker)

Favorite Work of Art - William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s Pietà.

Bouguereau painted the Pietà seven years after his four-year-old daughter died, and in the same year his 15-year-old son died. You can tell.

The painting is deliberately ambiguous: is Mary looking at the viewer, or at the heavens? What’s unmistakable is the contempt in her face. The subtle curl of her lip, the swollen eyes. Contempt for those who killed her son, for the collective sin of the world, and perhaps for God himself. Catholics believe Mary was conceived without sin, but sinless doesn’t mean unfeeling.

Meditating on Mary's face in this painting during a silent retreat was the first time she felt real to me. Not the sanitized, perfectly serene Mary of greeting cards—but a woman who had watched her son be executed, and whose face Bouguereau refused to clean up. I've come to call that expression "righteous contempt," and I know it well. I've felt it and I've earned it from others.

Less than two years after the Pietà, Bouguereau’s wife died of tuberculosis, followed two months later by their seven-month-old son. He would outlive one more child—an adult son, dead at 32. Of his five children, only one survived him.

His faith never broke.

So, there you have it! Let me know in the comments if you want more personal content like this from time-to-time.

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For anyone new here, I’m the founder of Woo Punch, a brand design studio rooted in marketing science.

I help brands ideate and design radically distinctive names, logos, mascots, and other core brand assets.

Work With me

A duck quacking an insurance company’s name. A gecko complaining about being confused with a brand name. A deer leaping across tractors. An apple stamped on computers.

These are examples of what I call Category-Defiant Distinctiveness (CDD)—names and assets deliberately built to defy category conventions while remaining unmistakably tied to their brands.

In my companion piece, Where Meaning-Free Distinctiveness Jumped the Shark, I argued that the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute (EBI) gave us the right measurement tool but the wrong creative brief. Their concept of “meaning-free distinctiveness”—where brand assets should be blank slates that point only to the brand—works brilliantly as a diagnostic. It tells you how well your assets are recognized, even outside of a category context. But it falls short as design guidance.

Every shape, word, color, object, and animal arrives loaded with associations—there's no such thing as a “blank slate” in naming or design. In fact, the most memorable identities don't avoid meaning; they borrow meaning from unexpected places.

This guide is a practical framework for creating Category-Defiant names and assets that defy category norms in a way that doesn’t isolate or confuse category buyers.

I’ll cover:

• The primary categories of CDD assets and their strategic applications—ranging from brand names like Apple, to name-based icons like the Aflac Duck, and tactical message vehicles like Geico’s Caveman.

• How to test and validate before and after launch—the specific checks that help you prime for distinctiveness during the conception of a name and/or asset and validate distinctiveness post-launch.

If you want the conceptual foundation—why EBI’s measurement tool shouldn’t be treated as design guidance, or why meaning isn’t the enemy but category meaning is—read my companion piece, Where Meaning-Free Distinctiveness Jumped the Shark.

In this article, we’ll move beyond theory and into practical frameworks.

Choosing Your Asset Type

CDD names and assets can take many forms. What matters most is breaking category norms while staying unmistakably tied to your brand within its category. Total out-of-context recognition—the kind where your logo gets spotted on a car window with zero context like an Apple sticker—is the pipe dream. Worth aiming for, but easy to chase at the expense of great, fame-driven ideas that work brilliantly within your category.

The following are the most common Category-Defiant asset types. Each has specific use cases, strengths, and limitations. This is not an exhaustive list.

Type 1: Name-Based Assets

Definition

Assets that draw directly from the brand’s name or a clever phonetic link.

How they work

The asset is Category-Defiant (a duck for insurance), but the link to the name is logical enough to reinforce recall. Distinctiveness comes from the mismatch with category; memorability comes from the name-asset connection.

When to use them

When your brand’s name is already Category-Defiant or abstract enough to support a non-intuitive visual or character for your category.

Advantages

They build name recall and asset recognition simultaneously. When the Aflac Duck quacks “AFLAC,” it’s reinforcing both the mascot and the brand’s name at once. Name-based character or spokesperson assets also often work across channels. The Aflac Duck’s distinctive voice, for example, works well on radio or podcasts where the duck can’t be seen.

Limitations

Name-Based Assets only work if the name itself is distinctive. Most generic names like “Quality Insurance” can’t spawn a memorable name-based asset.

Examples:

• The Aflac Duck: The Aflac Duck debuted on New Years Eve during Y2K. The duck appears in campaigns at the moment of confusion, precisely when people struggle to recall their insurance provider’s name. The phonetic link (Aflac ≈ quack) makes the name easier to remember while the duck—absurd for insurance—makes it distinctive.

  

• The Geico Gecko: The gecko also debuted in the late ‘90s, immediately complaining that callers were confusing him with the company, Geico, and kept calling him instead.

  

The General mascot is a notable exception. The brand took a common, generic word—”general”—which traditionally was the industry-standard term for broad coverage (home, auto, casualty), and gave it a distinct visual identity through a uniformed general character. The General cleverly flipped an existing industry term into an ownable brand icon.

Type 2: Character/Identity Assets

Definition

Assets rooted in a concept other than the brand’s literal name, but not exclusively tied to a specific message or positioning. This is the most common form of a Category-Defiant asset.

How they work

Distinctiveness is achieved through Category-Defiant execution (a crocodile for apparel, a cow for glue) combined with a strong, consistent branding system. The visual consistency—color, styling, placement—ensures recognition even when the message changes.

When to use them

When you need a flexible, adaptable asset that can support multiple campaigns, products, or messages over time.

Advantages

High adaptability. These assets can carry different messages without losing their connection to the brand because the visual consistency is what does the work.

Limitations

Brand attribution might not be as immediate as name-based assets, especially at launch. They require more repetition to cement the brand connection. Brands can get around this by referencing the brand’s name in some other way whenever the asset is present.

Examples:

• M&M’s: The most common form of a Character/Identity Asset is the traditional brand mascot. Tony the Tiger, Chester Cheetah, and the Pilsbury Doughboy are all instantly tied to their respective brands and adaptable to various messages. The M&M’s characters are a great example of versatility. During the Christmas season, M&M’s has run the exact same ad for decades to remind buyers that M&M’s makes great stocking stuffers, even without explicitly saying it. They are also employed during Halloween, tied to watching football, and promote new flavors (even when characters representing their traditional flavors are used to do it).

  

• Flo from Progressive: Originally created to promote Progressive’s “neighborhood friendly service,” Flo has since appeared in over a thousand commercials and conveyed a wide range of differentiators and Category Entry Points. The archetype (friendly service) does connote an individual differentiator, but the visual consistency—her signature grocery store clerk look, the bubbly personality—is what makes her adaptable to different messages.

  

• Jake from State Farm: Originally played by an actual State Farm agent, the campaign’s success led the company to cast Kevin Miles as the official spokesperson. Every ad reinforces the brand through rigorous visual and sonic consistency: Jake is always referred to as “Jake from State Farm,” dressed in red, surrounded by red-heavy design, and paired with a spoken variation of the classic 1980s jingle, “Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there” at the end of every ad. This intense, consistent reinforcement has made “Jake from State Farm” such a recognizable internal brand asset that it even allows the company to leverage celebrity star power without sacrificing brand recognition. State Farm now has the luxury of pairing Jake with A-listers like Patrick Mahomes, Drake, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Jason Bateman while maintaining undiluted brand recall. Most brands incorporate celebrities into their advertising at the expense of recognition.

  

• Colonel Sanders: Colonel Sanders didn't just found KFC—he actively transformed himself into its mascot while still alive. By appearing in advertisements and wearing his signature white suit and string tie everywhere, public and private, he erased the line between person and brand. After his death, KFC completed the transformation: first animating him in the 1990s, then cycling celebrities through his character. Similar to “Jake from State Farm,” KFC has seamlessly incorporated celebrities without losing brand recognition.

Type 3: Message Vehicles

Definition

CDD assets designed to carry a single, explicit message, differentiator, or category entry point, but through a Category-Defiant vehicle.

How they work

Message vehicles operate on a two-step principle: select for distinctiveness first, then anchor to your message. The vehicle itself should be Category-Defiant—something that makes no intuitive sense in your industry. The message it carries can be category-natural. This tension is what creates memorability.

When to use them

When you need to reinforce a strong message and you have the advertising budget to familiarize consumers with more than one brand asset.

Advantages

They drive home specific positioning with memorable shorthand. A weird asset vehicle makes a complex or generic message instantly understandable and hard to forget.

Limitations

• Restricted to one message. If your positioning shifts, the asset loses relevance. If you need to emphasize a different message, you will need a different asset.

• Must be paired with more adaptable assets (logo, color, characters, sonic branding) to maintain brand linkage across campaigns.

• High risk of becoming category-natural if the vehicle isn’t defiant enough.

• Larger budgets usually required to make them stick. Brands with restricted budgets should lean into adaptable assets before they’re able to create additional ones for more targeted messages.

Examples:

• Geico Caveman (”easy to use”): A sophisticated caveman offended by the slogan, “So easy a caveman can do it,” showing how simple it is to switch to Geico. The caveman is the Category-Defiant vehicle; the message is straightforward. For over 25 years, Geico has used the same distinctive voice actor across its campaigns, building a rock-solid, adaptable, and instantly recognizable brand identity, even as they deploy new message vehicles.

  

• Limu Emu & Doug (savings): One of a dozen random spokescharacter ideas from Goodby Silverstein & Partners, chosen because they tested well. Before landing on a detective and his bird sidekick, Liberty Mutual toyed with a misunderstood T-Rex and a pigeon in yellow pants. The ads show the duo “fighting crime”—i.e., helping people avoid overpaying for car insurance. Pure Category-Defiant chaos with a category-relevant message grafted onto it.

  Note: The absurdist humor of the duo does distract from the message. Not everyone picks up on what Liberty Mutual is trying to say. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as it might even give the duo more flexibility down the road. The Limu Emu is also technically a name-based asset given it’s a short-hand for Liberty Mutual, but even I frequently forget that and the campaigns don’t revolve around the name like Geico and Aflac.

  

• Coca-Cola Polar Bears: First introduced in 1922 to personify "cold refreshment on a hot day," the bears were famously revived in the 1990s to anchor the brand specifically to the winter holidays. Because they are used almost exclusively to drive consumption during the winter, they currently function as a message vehicle rather than a general character/identity asset. This represents an untapped opportunity, as the polar bears could easily extend beyond winter-specific messaging. Crucially, the polar bears are never isolated from Coca-Cola’s stronger assets. They are always playing with or holding Coca-Cola’s most recognized and distinctive asset, its iconic classic bottle shape.

  

A word of caution:

Message Vehicles need strong branding, or they become someone else’s ads. When I’ve asked people to match Allstate’s Mayhem or Professor Rick from Progressive with their brands, most can’t—despite remembering and even enjoying their ads.

These campaigns are weaker for two reasons. First, the Message Vehicles aren’t reinforced strongly enough with their core brand assets (like Allstate’s Dennis Haysbert or Progressive’s Flo). Contrast those examples with more cohesive brand pairings: Geico’s Caveman and narrator; Coca-Cola’s Polar Bears and the signature contour bottle; and Liberty Mutual’s Limu Emu & Doug duo, integrated with the branded vehicle and mnemonic jingle.

Second, Mayhem and Professor Rick are category-natural. Clever execution, but the vehicle itself embodies the message too directly. This choice might drive home the message, but sacrifices brand recognition in the process. If the audience doesn’t know who’s advertising, the message is useless.

In the end, Mayhem and Professor Rick win the laugh; Limu Emu wins brand recall.

Need a Category-Defiant Brand?

I help brands ideate and design radically distinctive names, logos, mascots, and other assets.

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Naming Strategies for CDD

A brand’s name is obviously the most repeated brand element—on packaging, ads, search, receipts, and in conversations. While not always the first thing a consumer notices and recalls, a Category-Defiant name provides a foundation for other assets to build recognition over time.

Below are the main types* of Category-Defiant names.

*This is not an exhaustive list. Category-Defiant names can look to places, people, phrases, and other areas for inspiration. Some names can also live in between the types below with one foot in each type (for a more exhaustive and nuanced spectrum of all name types, check out Rob Meyerson’s article here).

Type 1: Familiar Objects

Definition

A familiar, everyday object with no intuitive tie to the category.

Advantages

• Sparks instant mental imagery

• Naturally seeds visual logos

Limitations

• May need heavy Category Identifiers early on to avoid confusion

• Can be locked by dominant brands if not significantly altered (a generic “target” logo → Target owns it)

Examples:

• Apple (fruit → tech): Apples are rich with symbology, but an apple in tech was nonsense in 1976—which was why it worked. A common misconception is that Steve Jobs chose the name to tie it in with Isaac Newton, but that connection was made after the fact when designing their first logo. He simply liked how it sounded and that it came before Atari in the phone book.

• Shell (seashell → fuel): A seashell for a gas station makes no immediate sense, defying logic (and inspiring strained post-rationalizations about “fossil fuels”).

• Domino’s (tabletop game → pizza): A game piece for food. The phonetic ease and visual potential made it work.

Type 2: Animals

Definition

A living creature with no functional link to the product or service.

Advantages

• High recall—human brains are wired to notice and remember animals

• Easy to animate or personify

• Often travels globally without translation issues

Limitations

• Needs heavy Category Identifiers early on to avoid confusion

• Can be locked by dominant brands (a generic puma logo → Puma owns it)

Examples:

• John Deere (deer → tractors): Deer are highly symbolic, but a deer made no sense for heavy machinery when the brand launched. It wasn’t symbolic; it was simply distinctive and built-in given the founder’s name. Meaning was built around it later (i.e., “Runs like a Deere”).

• Penguin Books (penguin → books): A penguin for publishing. No logical connection, high memorability. Orange accents strengthen the distinctiveness of an otherwise relatively generic penguin.

• Camel (camel → cigarettes): An exotic animal for tobacco. The imagery was striking and ownable. Camel’s name was originally chosen to convey the brand’s use of Turkish tobacco. Today, that fact is relegated to pop trivia.

  ---

Important note on Objects and Animals:

When designing visual assets based on your visual name, always include a distinctive twist. The bite out of Apple’s apple logo, Shell’s yellow-and-red color scheme, Starbucks’ two-finned mermaid—all add layers of distinctiveness to an already Category-Defiant name. This allows for ease of recognition even outside the category.

Type 3: Abstract/Invented

Definition

A made-up or unfamiliar word

When to use

When you want maximum ownability from day one, no competing associations, and future-proof flexibility.

Advantages

• Can be ownable at the start

• Fewer competing associations to fight

• Future-proof—less likely to box your positioning in as you grow

Limitations

• Harder to spell or pronounce

• No built-in imagery

• Slower initial recall—requires more repetition

Examples:

• Google: A misspelling of “googol” (10^100), chosen to suggest vast scale. A little-known fact among most consumers, and therefore Category-Defiant* in their minds.

• Spotify: Invented blend suggesting “spot” and “identify.”

• Zillow: The invented name “Zillow” was carefully designed to combine “zillions” (massive data) and “pillows” (comfort). Despite the extensive thought behind this conception, the name’s sophisticated origin and intended dual connotation are lost to consumers. The name could have just as easily been drawn out of a hat. It works because it’s distinctive, easy to spell, and easy to pronounce, not because it makes consumers think of pillows or data.

• Roku: Japanese for “six,” chosen because it was the sixth product the founder created. But to most English speakers, it’s abstract—and therefore ownable.

  ---

*There is some debate over whether an asset qualifies as “random” if its origin was rooted in meaning—like Wendy’s being named after Dave Thomas’ daughter. In my view, if the backstory is unknown to the average consumer, the asset is functionally random in a market context. While brand scaling often brings these origin stories to light, it doesn’t retroactively inject meaning into what would have come across as unnatural to consumers early on (and in most cases unnatural to consumers today).

This creates a strategic bridge for designers: by using personally significant meaning to the client to generate an asset that feels visually random (or Category-Defiant) to the consumer, you satisfy the client’s need for purpose and the brand’s need for distinctiveness.

Type 4: Compound Words

Definition

When two or more common words are combined where either one (Blue Apron) or both (White Claw) are unnatural for the category.

Advantages

• Feels fresh yet approachable

• Sparks curiosity

• Easier to trademark when combined (when individual words aren’t available)

• When one word is natural to the category, it can become a built-in category identifier.

Limitations

• Can sound forced if the pairing feels random

• Needs repetition to stick

Examples:

• Red Bull (color + animal → energy drink): A bull makes associative sense for energy, but “Red Bull” as a combination is unexpected and memorable.

• White Castle (color + structure → burgers): Individually, the two words have no connection to burgers,* but when paired, they create a highly distinctive brand concept.

• Firefox (element + animal → browser): In this case, fire was sometimes used in tech language (e.g., firewall, firewire), but foxes were certainly Category-Defiant.

*Thirty years after White Castle, Burger King essentially copied their idea, adopting regal imagery. This demonstrates that even the most original CDD names are sometimes, though rarely, imitated.

When Category-Natural Assets Work (And Why CDD Is Still Better)

Category-natural assets can work—but only with distinctive execution, significant investment, and careful design. Two examples illustrate this:

Example 1: Chick-fil-A

What they did

The campaign emphasizes Chick Fil-A’s famous customer service. Like most brands, Chick Fil-A used customer testimonials to convey their reputation. Nothing out of the ordinary yet.

Why it works… for them

This campaign thrives on distinctive execution and consistency.

• Chick Fil-A’s brand has achieved a rare feat: “owning” color. Despite a sea of red in fast food, Chick Fil-A has long emphasized white in its red-and-white color scheme to stand out further. Most fast-food competitors pair red with yellow (McDonald’s), gold (Burger King), black (Pizza Hut), or just go heavy on red (Wendy’s). In this campaign, we see a stark white backdrop.

• The red studio-couch format adds a further distinctive twist on customer testimonials.

• Each ad begins and ends with a distinctive melody.

• Chick Fil-A has invested significantly in this format for several years.

Why you shouldn’t attempt this

Few brands achieve real differentiation. Chick-fil-A isn’t trying to convince people they’re friendly—they already have a hard-earned reputation for it in a category where friendly service is rare. That’s why their simple white room/red couch format works, unlike Allstate’s Mayhem (where Allstate isn’t uniquely famous for protection against disasters).

Chick-fil-A’s believability and instant recognition only come with scale and time. They leverage decades of equity and consistent execution to make testimonials feel authentic, not aspirational. Their hospitality is a fast food “unicorn” that competitors can’t replicate without the same long-term, high-investment commitment to service.

Example 2: Amazon

What they did

Amazon’s logo utilizes the most ubiquitous symbol in the logistics industry: the arrow. This is a category-natural choice for a company that has effectively transitioned from a digital storefront into a global fulfillment and delivery powerhouse.

Why it works… for them

• The arrow doubles as a smile.

• The arrow incorporates distinctive details (the disconnected stem, the cut in the “z”).

• The arrow is anchored to the Category-Defiant name “Amazon.”

• Amazon has invested heavily in its color system and uniquely shaped delivery trucks to supplement the arrow.

Why you shouldn’t attempt this

Again, a significant budget is required. Amazon’s arrow works because Amazon was early to market, has a distinctive name, and has saturated our lives.

Execution and saturation make category-natural assets stick—but it comes at a steep cost. Smaller brands have fewer opportunities to build recognition through sheer repetition. Category-Defiant assets can help accelerate memorability, providing an efficient option for limited budgets—though exposure and consistency still matter.

A one-person remodeling business with a founder’s name and a wrench logo can vanish even after dozens of exposures. That same business with a different name—Grizzly Remodeling—and a bear mascot, can stand out after a few glances and still stick a month later. CDD does the heavy lifting a small budget can’t, making it an effective, scalable option for limited resources.

The Three-Step Implementation Process

Creating Category-Defiant assets isn't about following a rigid formula—it's about applying a disciplined process that increases your odds of building something memorable and ownable.

The framework below distills the approach into three core phases: designing assets that break category conventions, testing them rigorously to confirm they actually work, and reinforcing them consistently until they become unmistakable. Each step builds on the last. Skip the design phase, and you'll have nothing distinctive to test. Skip the testing phase, and you risk investing heavily in an asset that confuses rather than clarifies. Skip the reinforcement phase, and even the most brilliant asset will fade into obscurity.

This isn't theoretical—it's the playbook used by brands like Apple, Aflac, and Geico to turn absurd ideas into iconic identities that last. What follows is how to put everything together.

Step 1: Design to Stand Out (Through Category-Defiant Distinctiveness)

Start with competitive mapping:

1. List every competitor in your category

2. Document their names, colors, logos, mascots, symbols, tones

3. Identify the patterns—what do they all have in common?

4. Reject those patterns

Choose your CDD approach:

• Will you use a name-based asset (if possible)?

• A character/identity asset (for long-term flexibility)?

• A message vehicle (for a specific positioning and, ideally, paired with a more flexible additional asset)?

• Or start with a CDD naming strategy if you don’t already have a name (object, animal, abstract, word combination)?

Apply the filters:

• Ensure Category Identifiers are clear

• Check for Aesthetic Fit (positive affect, loose brand fit, no category confusion)

• For more direction on both, check out this article’s companion piece: Where Meaning-Free Distinctiveness Jumped the Shark

The goal: an asset idea that breaks category conventions while remaining unmistakably tied to your brand.

Step 2: Test to Confirm It Works (Through Rigorous Measurement)

Category-Defiant Distinctiveness is a guide, not a measurement outcome like EBI’s meaning-free distinctiveness. It’s an efficient, defensible starting point—but it’s not a guarantee. At the end of the day, a Category-Defiant name or asset can feel unique, but uniqueness isn’t a feeling—it’s a verifiable outcome.

The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute (EBI) measures assets that have lived in the market for two factors:

• Fame: The percentage of category buyers who recognize the asset when shown it, regardless of whether they can name the brand.

• Uniqueness: Calculated as the number of people who correctly identify the brand, divided by the number of times any brand is attributed to the asset.

Crucially, Uniqueness cannot exist without some Fame, and Fame cannot exist without market exposure. Category-Defiant Distinctiveness does not end with name and asset creation. Savvy marketers must test assets rigorously over the brand’s life. Never assume distinctiveness.

• Track Fame (percentage of category buyers who recognize your asset)

• Track Uniqueness (correct brand attribution divided by total mentions)

• Monitor these over time as your asset gains market exposure

The goal: Validate that your asset is both distinctive and clear before significant investment or replacing any assets.

Step 3: Reinforce Until Unmistakable (Through Consistent Repetition)

Consistency is non-negotiable:

• Use the same colors, logos, and assets across all touchpoints

• Repeat the same visual and sonic cues in every campaign

• Don’t “refresh” until the asset is firmly established and avoid design overhauls* unless absolutely necessary

  ---

  *Asset replacement is generally warranted only under issues of high risk, such as legal issues (e.g., trademark infringement) or an irredeemable reputation that is severely outdated and beyond salvage. Alternatively, a change may be prudent if a small, generic brand has the financial resources—a large budget and strong leadership—to successfully establish a new asset and counteract the inevitable customer confusion that follows such a major pivot.

  ---

The goal: Make your asset unmistakable within your category context, even if you never achieve Apple-level out-of-context recognition.

Final Considerations

Distinctiveness Is Only One Factor

• Distinctiveness is significant, but it’s only one factor in brand growth. Brands can grow with generic names and assets, but these approaches are usually far more costly—requiring early market entry, heavy upfront investment, aggressive competitor acquisitions, or shelf saturation.

• For some brands, growth isn’t a priority. They may be content staying local with a few locations—whether for principled reasons, less stress, closer customer relationships, or other motivations.

Any brand can succeed to some extent with the right mix of strategy and luck—even with a generic name and assets.

The Road Less Traveled

CDD isn’t a magic formula. It’s a method to make names and assets as defensible, memorable, and efficient as possible. It won’t guarantee success—distribution, pricing, product quality, and timing all matter too. But it stacks the odds in your favor.

For those willing to step off the familiar path and reject the category-natural clichés that surround them, the road less traveled is exactly where the gold lies.

Design to stand out. Test to confirm it works. Reinforce until unmistakable.

That’s how you build a distinctive brand.

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The Super Bowl Isn’t a LinkedIn Comment Section

This year, three ads had the marketing world buzzing before the game even started—Pepsi, Xfinity, and Claude. Marketers called them bold, differentiated, must-watch. Then the game happened.

As my kids ran laps around the living room and my wife and I fed them dinner, I caught these ads in my peripheral vision—exactly how most viewers experience them. The ads that dominate LinkedIn don’t dominate the living room. You can't judge an ad from your desk chair with noise-canceling headphones. You can only truly test it with a distracted glance while someone throws food. That's the reality of advertising consumption, even for Super Bowl ads in 2026.

I remember Super Bowl parties where the sacred rule was no talking during commercials. Those days are gone (unless you’re a marketer). For years, Super Bowl ads have stopped entertaining and started trying to "matter"—desperate social purpose, glossy emptiness, nostalgic celebrities parachuted in with no humor and no point. We're battling devices, second screens, and fractured attention, and the ads themselves have surrendered. In the midst of it all, somehow, brands are still hiding their logos until the final two seconds.

Some respected marketing scientists are now saying we are too obsessed with distinctiveness. They say we need more entertainment, more emotion, and more creativity. I agree with the second part, but if this year’s most celebrated ads taught us anything, it is that we are far from being too obsessed with distinctiveness. Pepsi advertised its competitors assets and Claude followed the traditional Cannes Lions playbook: do everything you can to avoid showing your audience your brand.

Xfinity, meanwhile, hit the balance. Humor, nostalgia, attention, celebrity—and crucially, strong brand codes (given what they have to work with). If they commit to their spokesperson long-term, he could become the next Kevin Miles ("Jake from State Farm") or Milana Vayntrub (AT&T)—an ownable face that strengthens brand codes through consistent, exclusive association.

If the living room is chaos, if attention is fractured, if even Super Bowl ads can't command focus—how do you break through? The solution isn't louder. It isn't more emotional. It certainly isn't more "meaningful." The solution is designing for the moment when someone isn't paying attention at all. Because that's not the exception anymore. That's the default.

Design for the Most Distracted Brain in the Room

There’s a principle from physical product design worth borrowing: design for the extremes. Build a dish scrubber that works for someone with severe arthritis, and it works effortlessly for everyone else. The same logic applies to advertising. Don’t design for the average viewer. Design for the most distracted brain in the room.

As someone with ADHD, I am that extreme. My brain doesn’t pay attention to advertising—it scans for patterns mid-thought. For a brand to build familiarity with me, it can’t just be relatively distinctive. It has to be Category-Defiant.

Category-Defiant Distinctiveness (CDD) means completely abandoning the visual sea of sameness that plagues your industry. Not a slightly more unique version of your competitor—something so visually unmistakable it bypasses the logical brain entirely. If every AI platform uses a spacey logo and color gradients, you go organic, orange and hand-drawn like Claude. If every energy drink brand is loud and hyper-masculine, invest in whimsical illustrations like Red Bull or Ghost.

You could even take it a step further: conquer the soda industry with polar bears, upend insurance with an emu, or dominate the pizza world by naming your empire after a parlor game.

Category-Defiant Distinctiveness (CDD) matters most for light buyers—the occasional and non-buyers who, according to the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, drive the vast majority of any brand's revenue. They function exactly like someone with ADHD: they aren't actively watching your ad, and even when they do pay attention, they won't buy for another three years. Which means repeated, distinctive exposure is the only thing building the familiarity that eventually triggers purchase. You don't need a clever message. You need an unmistakable visual hook that registers before the brain looks away.

Saturate the Screen With Your Brand

I loved Claude’s Super Bowl ad when I watched it on LinkedIn with headphones. In the corner of my eye during the game, the brand was invisible—teased out until the very end. If your concept relies on a generic-looking actor saying generic things while withholding the brand until the final seconds, you’re betting everything on full attention you’ll never get.

Compare Claude to Gemini’s ad, which takes place almost entirely inside their interface. They fabricated a fictional interface for the sole purpose of plastering “Google Gemini” throughout the ad—and then smartly incorporated Google Photos, a far more familiar brand, to ensure no one mistook it for ChatGPT or any other competitor. They also wrote the ad as if no one in the audience had ever used Gemini before.

Xfinity’s Jurassic Park ad is the goal. Compare it to Volkswagen’s “The Force” from 2011. Both leveraged beloved films. Both made you feel something. But Xfinity wove their brand into the concept itself—the story only works because of Xfinity. VW teased theirs until the end, and most viewers never even made the connection. Xfinity had a fighting chance to be remembered. VW gave away memory for admiration.

If your idea only works by hiding your brand (or showcasing your competitor’s brand), it's the wrong idea. The best creative minds get Super Bowl gigs precisely because they can work within constraints. Ads aren't Oscar bait—they have to sell. That's what makes them more creative than short films, not less. Real creativity thrives in constraints. Short films just need to entertain. Ads need to entertain and move product. That's harder.

This Applies to You

You probably aren’t running Super Bowl ads. But the rules don’t change by budget size—they get stricter.

Massive brands can survive some of these mistakes. Pepsi will be fine after inadvertently promoting Coca-Cola to millions of distracted viewers. But if you’re a smaller brand, you can’t afford to hide yourself and you can’t thrive on a generic identity. Invest in a category-defiant brand. If you’re established, add a category-defiant asset—a mascot, a visual signature, something that refuses to blend in. You can survive with a generic name or logo, but only if something else in the mix is unmistakable. I help brands build exactly these things: names, logos, mascots, and other distinctive assets designed to cut through the noise before the brain has a chance to look away.

The living room is the jury. Not LinkedIn.

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The Super Bowl Myth

The most effective Super Bowl ads are clever, emotional, funny, and inspirational.

We’ve all bought into this myth. But does it hold true, considering what we’ve learned about consumer behavior from marketing science, behavioral science, and advertising psychology? Was 2011’s VW ad “The Force” effective at selling VWs? Or is the forgettable Nerds ad from this year a better (and more realistic) standard for advertisers to aspire to?

Which ads will help the brands being advertised sell products, and which ads might simply help the creative agencies behind them win awards?

Why My Rankings Are Different

Most Super Bowl ad rankings are popularity contests or pretested audience reactions. Both have a fundamental flaw: they don’t account for memory decay or measure real-world distracted viewing.

Most consumers are distracted and most advertising gets immediately forgotten. But that doesn’t mean the brand will be forgotten. Familiarity matters. Every exposure makes a brand more familiar, and we’re heavily biased toward familiar brands.

The best way to succeed with a Super Bowl ad is to: 1) be distinctive, 2) back that ad with years of consistent exposure before and after, and/or 3) employ a gimmick that might win short-term but fizzle out quickly.

My rating system is heavily weighted toward distinctiveness and consistency.

It’s not a perfect system, however. My rankings are subjective—based on whether brands have consistently advertised to me and whether they’re distinctive to me. But I might have a superpower that gets me closer to the average consumer’s experience: my ADHD. I rarely pick up on messaging and my attention is constantly elsewhere when experiencing advertising.

To reach me, a brand can’t just be relatively distinctive—it has to be Category-Defiant. A brand can’t just be consistent—it has to saturate my world.

Brands must “design for the extremes” to stand out for distracted brains like mine and, by doing so, meet everyone’s distracted brains. That’s why I place such a high premium on brand distinctiveness and consistency when evaluating the Super Bowl lineup.

Brands Waste Millions When They’re Not Distinctive

Brands spend millions on Super Bowl ads. Most of that spend is wasted—not because Super Bowl ads are poor investments, but because brands either don’t have a consistent presence in our lives or don’t stand out among competitors.

That’s why I pursue Category-Defiant Distinctiveness when naming brands and designing identities. I actively gather competitor assets and advertising, then do as close to the opposite as possible without confusing or isolating light buyers. This includes logos, brand mascots, taglines, colors, sonic logos, and other fluent devices.

For many brands that advertised this year, their hands are tied. It’s too late to overhaul their identity. But your brand could be different. If you’re launching a new brand or product, or strengthening your current brand, reach out.

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How I Grade Super Bowl Ads

Below is the explanation for my rating system. If you would like to skip ahead to the rankings, scroll past my 5 Keys.

The 5 Keys to an Effective Super Bowl Ad

I believe there are 5 keys to an effective ad based on the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute’s research into marketing effectiveness, Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman’s research into behavioral science, and Robert Heath’s research into the psychology of advertising. These 5 keys are Distinctiveness, Consistency, Broad-Reach, Category Entry Points, and Attention.

Certainly, other factors can go into whether or not an ad is effective, but the following 5 keys should be the primary objectives of any effective ad.

Each key is not created equal so I gave them different weights. For example, if a Super Bowl ad is clever and funny (scores well in Attention), but the brand being advertised is lost in the mix (scores poorly in Distinctiveness), that ad will have a lower grade than a boring but well-branded ad. That’s because Distinctiveness is far more important than Attention.

You can read more detail about these keys in my Super Bowl article from 2022 but I will summarize them here.

To grade this year’s ads, as always, I assigned the following percentages to each key:

DISTINCTIVENESS - 65%

The first key factor for an effective Super Bowl ad is distinctiveness, and I estimate that distinctiveness accounts for up to 65% of an ad’s effectiveness. If an ad isn't strongly linked to the brand being advertised throughout using distinctive audio, thematic, and visual cues, it will essentially be a waste of money. We won’t know who was advertised.

Despite this, many brands sacrifice these cues in favor of emotional narratives, virtue signaling, or humor. Advertisers often treat ads like short films aimed at winning creative awards, not tools to sell products. This is a mistake.

CONSISTENCY - 20%

The second biggest factor for an effective Super Bowl ad is consistency. I estimate consistency accounts for up to 20% of an ad's effectiveness.

If the brand being advertised has never been advertised before, or the brand has consistently advertised, but its Super Bowl ad is dramatically different from all of its other ads, consumers will find it hard to link the ad to its correct brand.

BROAD-REACH - 8%

The third factor is broad-reach. As a whole, broad-reach is more important than consistency and sometimes even distinctiveness. I estimate that broad-reaching advertising channels account for as much as 80% of advertising effectiveness in some cases. But here, I'm grading content, not advertising channels.

As a result, I estimate that broad-reaching messaging or content accounts for around 8% of a Super Bowl ad's effectiveness relative to all other key factors. Instead of catering to a specific demographic or psychographic, Super Bowl ads should target all category buyers with their messaging and content.

CATEGORY ENTRY POINTS (CEPs) - 5%

The 4th most significant factor for an effective ad is Category Entry Points (CEPs).

Rather than differentiating your brand, you should try to tap into why consumers buy from your category in the first place before they even consider brands. Most consumers don’t perceive the differences between brands. Therefore, while differentiation can be effective for niche brands targeting heavy category buyers looking for additional customization, it's costly to establish a differentiator among distracted buyers who are the key to long-term growth. By prioritizing CEPs the goal is to simply be considered in various buying situations.

Again, I explain this in more detail in my 2022 article.

While CEPs are extremely helpful, they take a lot of time and repetition to build. Because of this, I'm grading individual ads here without considering a brand's overall advertising, so I estimate CEPs account for around 5% of an ad’s effectiveness during stand-alone Super Bowl ads.

ATTENTION - 2%

Finally, attention is the least important (but still critical) key to an effective ad.

While marketing gurus and the general public think attention is the most essential key for a Super Bowl ad, attention is complicated and misunderstood. There are several types of attention and not all are good when it comes to advertising. High attention can even have a negative effect on sales. I estimate that attention accounts for around 2% of Super Bowl ad effectiveness.

My estimates for each key aren't an exact science, and there are additional keys that can be helpful that I don't discuss here, but I wanted to grade these ads on the most critical factors.

My Grades for This Year’s Super Bowl Ads

MY TOP 5 BEST

Strengths:

• Dunkin’ has been killing it the last several years at the Super Bowl, making my Top 5 three years in a row.

Weaknesses:

• Celebrities are a high-risk gamble. You can’t control their personal lives, their next controversy, or—most importantly—their loyalty to other brands. However, if you’re going to play the game, follow the Dunkin’ playbook: Total brand saturation. If your brand identity isn’t strong enough to pair with a celebrity's image, you have a bigger problem. If that’s the case, let’s talk.

Strengths:

• Pringles benefits from a highly recognizable product shape and distinctive tube packaging.

• In this Super Bowl ad, Pringles seamlessly incorporates their distinctive tube and product shape into the storyline.

• Pringles has also frequently made my Top 5 list.

Weaknesses:

• Unlike previous Pringles Super Bowl appearances where someone’s hand gets stuck in a Pringles tube at a party—demonstrating the category entry point of “a snack for a party”—there is no category entry point on display here.

• Sabrina Carpenter is somewhat controversial. She illustrates the issue with celebrities: you can’t control their brand image.

Strengths:

• There is no mistaking the T-Mobile brand here. It’s an explosion of pink.

• T-Mobile has been ratcheting up their ad spend significantly over the last few years.

Weaknesses:

• For the record, I hate NSYNC and don’t even have the time to look up if this ad featured NSYNC or the Backstreet Boys. I know many others like me, so I punished them slightly for not including a 90s band that was more universally loved.

Strengths:

• Most of the ad takes place within Gemini’s interface. This is a significant deviation from every other AI ad we saw this year. This was likely a strategic choice to remain consistent with historic Google ads, but it doubles as a trick to eliminate the "brand desert" often created when storytelling takes precedence over the product. This was Claude’s fatal trade-off. Despite possessing an unusually strong differentiator and the most distinctive brand in the space, the execution missed the mark. Hence the D+ in this list; great branding and differentiation is wasted if the audience can't find the brand. But at least they didn’t get a D- like OpenAI or an F- like GenSpark.

• Google’s more distinctive color scheme, where Google Photos is present throughout, makes up for Gemini’s generic branding.

• Leave it to Google to turn a technology with significant societal downside personal. It almost makes you forget that so many people are using AI to avoid personal contact at all costs.

Weaknesses:

• Gemini’s logo lacks true distinctiveness. In fact, its near-identity to GenSpark’s logo is precisely why the latter landed in my Top 5 Worst rankings this year. This is a shared failure: when AI is intuitively linked to space, stars become “category-natural” clichés. Combined with heavy gradients—another industry trope—the brand loses its edge. Gemini only recovers by leaning into Google’s broader ecosystem; their recent shift from a blue-to-purple gradient to Google’s iconic color palette was a necessary move to reclaim brand equity. If you want to build a brand that competitors can't easily mimic, let’s talk.

Strengths:

• This ad gets viewers to look up and the Hellmann’s brand is rarely missing throughout.

Weaknesses:

• There is a particular brand of humor here that isn’t everyone’s favorite. There is also something unappetizing about mayo being squirted out of a bottle by a stranger at a diner.

MY TOP 5 WORST

Strengths:

• It could be worse. It's not actively bad. It’s just actively mediocre.

• Spectrum’s ad won’t alienate any audiences.

Weaknesses:

• Spectrum continues its trend of “safe” advertising, resulting in a spot that is the definition of a category cliché. Except, hiding your brand isn’t safe.

• Brand building isn’t about overt emotion. It’s about covert emotion. Don’t tell us why we should like you. Entertain us or make us quietly feel something without realizing it.

Strengths:

• It won’t turn anyone off, other than those expecting at least some level of entertainment in a Super Bowl ad.

• There is a strong category entry point: get tested so you can prevent unknown health issues.

Weaknesses:

• Was there a secret competition I missed? Which brand can disappear most completely? You can’t just throw a couple of celebrities into an ad and expect it to work like a magic pill. You have to at least try to tell the audience who you are.

Strengths:

• They chose a universally liked celebrity.

• The brand name was spoken throughout.

• There was a very strong category entry point: use AI to save time at work.

Weaknesses:

• GenSpark entered the Super Bowl conversation with no prior brand equity. The lack of reach and total absence from PR channels meant the ad had to do all the heavy lifting for a brand that, until last night, simply didn't exist in the public consciousness as far as I’m aware.

• Watching this live, I was genuinely baffled. I was convinced I was seeing a new Gemini product launch. Why? Because they straight-up stole Gemini’s logo. Between a name that also starts with "Ge" and the recycled aesthetic, it’s a perfect case study in how uninspired AI branding is and why it’s so important to invest in a Category-Defiant brand. It turns out there is one thing AI can’t generate: distinctiveness. GenSpark’s creators clearly missed the memo: you’re supposed to pretend AI can design a brand from scratch, not actually let it do it.

Strengths:

• The ad certainly grabs your attention in an era when advertising is cluttered with neons, bright lights, and epilepsy-induced cuts.

Weaknesses:

• Coinbase is a repeat offender. They first hit my Top 5 Worst list in 2022 with their cryptic QR code stunt, and they clearly haven’t learned their lesson. They continue to prioritize “the gimmick” over the brand, failing to realize that if the audience doesn't know who’s advertising, the millions spent on airtime are essentially a donation to the entire crypto industry.

Strengths:

• The ad grabs your attention.

• It’s clearly linked to sports betting.

• Kendall Jenner is widely unliked, but she’s not necessarily loathed.

Weaknesses:

• I did a double-take on this one. When I saw an “F” logo flash over my screen at the beginning, I assumed it was a FanDuel ad. It wasn’t until the end when I realized, “Oh they didn’t say FanDuel, they said Fanatics. Wait, isn’t that a clothing company?”

• Look. Just because you own a sports apparel company does not mean you can pivot entirely into gambling without warning. Apparel and gambling are, in fact, two very different things. One ensures you are fully clothed while representing your favorite team. The other will ruin your life. You have to prime people first before you jump into an entirely different category. Hence, the F- - for consistency.

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All Grades:

1. Pringles: A+

2. T-Mobile: A+

3. Dunkin: A+

4. Gemini: A

5. Hellman's: A

6. Nerds: A-

7. Bud Light: A-

8. Ritz: A-

9. Budweiser: A-

10. Ritz: A-

11. Instacart: A-

12. Levi's: A-

13. Michelob Ultra: A-

14. Liquid Death: B+

15. Ro: B+

16. Kellog's: B+

17. Kinder Bueno: B+

18. Uber Eats: B

19. Apartment & Homes.com: B

20. Xfinity: B-

21. Toyota: B-

22. Poppi: B-

23. TurboTax: B-

24. Ring: B-

25. Bosch: B-

26. VW B-

27. Oikos: B-

28. Salesforce: B-

29. Pepsi: C+

30. State Farm: C+

31. Hims & Hers: C+

32. Novartis: C+

33. Wegovy: C+

34. Wix: C

35. Dove: C

36. Lay's: C

37. Manscaped: C-

38. Liquid IV: C-

39. Pokemon: C-

40. Oakley/Meta: C-

41. Squarespace: C-

42. Cadillac: D+

43. GrubHub: D+

44. Claude: D+

45. Blue Square Alliance: D

46. Alexa: D

47. United/Starlink: D-

48. ChatGPT: D-

49. Redfin: D-

50. He Gets Us: D-

51. Spectrum: F+

52. Boehringer: F

53. GenSpark: F-

54. Coinbase: F-

55. Fanatics Sportsbook: F-

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The Idea That Divided Marketing: Meaning-Free Distinctiveness

In 2010, Byron Sharp and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute (EBI) introduced meaning-free distinctiveness (referred to as meaningless distinctiveness at the time) in How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don’t Know.

Forget purpose, differentiation, or epic storytelling. EBI said shoppers buy what they recognize, not what moves them. Brand assets—logos, jingles, mascots, colors—shouldn’t mean much at all, just point straight to the brand. Recognition beats interpretation. And they argued that this “meaning-free distinctiveness” is far more powerful for brand growth than the old pursuit of “meaningful differentiation,” which, while real, does little heavy lifting. EBI didn’t just talk smack; they backed it with data that made everyone squirm.

Consumers operate on efficiency. They spot a familiar cue, pick the product, and keep moving. EBI handed us a ruler (assets that scream one brand only in any context) and a recipe (keep ’em “blank slates”). The measurement logic holds: assets work best when the brand itself carries all the meaning, even outside the category. That’s the target—100% ownership—even if no brand ever reaches it. Some confusion always lingers, even for the Nike swoosh or Coca-Cola script. The goal is maximum dominance.

Meaning-free distinctiveness is an empirical measurement outcome and a useful benchmark. The flaw lies in EBI’s creative prescription: it sometimes treats “blank slate” as design guidance for new assets, rather than the earned end-state of dominant ones.

That’s where they jumped the shark.

The Trouble with “Meaning-Free” in Practice

After Byron Sharp introduced the idea in How Brands Grow, his colleague Jenni Romaniuk explored it further in Building Distinctive Brand Assets (2018). She writes, “The brand wants assets that evoke little (other than the brand name)—the blanker the slate, the easier it will be to make your brand a memorable part of the asset’s network for category buyers.”

Romaniuk illustrated the idea with Pringles:
“If I see the [Pringles] man and associate him with being Italian… I might remember Pringles, or think of Italy… pasta and so on.”

In 2022, she clarified the concept in Contagious:
“A meaning‑free asset is one where the strongest meaning is actually the brand. … If you have something that already has a strong meaning, the brand is constantly fighting that old meaning.”

Most recently, in Marketing Week (2025), she used Lancashire Tea’s rose logo to make the same point:
“Seeing an image of a rose reminds you of the fabulous Michael Douglas/Kathleen Turner War of the Roses movie… and… you fail to register the Lancashire Tea brand sitting next to the rose image.”

These examples illustrate a valid measurement point—strong existing associations dilute brand ownership. Presented as design rules, however, they assume shoppers conduct mental detours in the aisle. But grocery aisles aren’t therapy sessions. Nobody pauses mid-shop to free-associate prior Italy trips or Michael Douglas movies. Recognition happens in a blink.

To me, meaning isn’t the problem—category meaning is. When every brand in a category already carries familiar cues, brands blend together. Banks use blue to signal trust. Dairy uses cows. Coffee shops use earth tones. Distinctiveness is an afterthought.

Looking for a distinctive and timeless brand? I’m currently open for design and naming projects.

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Enter Category-Defiant Distinctiveness (CDD): Flip the Script, Own the Shelf

The goal isn’t to avoid meaning—it’s to avoid the kind that makes you disappear: to defy your category and stand out. That’s what I call Category-Defiant Distinctiveness (CDD): names* and assets deliberately built to defy category meaning. It bridges EBI’s measurement logic for existing assets with the creative challenge of building memorability from scratch.

*Note: Although EBI’s research focuses on assets like logos and colors, the principles—distinctiveness before meaning—can inform how brands approach naming. Names, like assets, benefit when they stand out relative to category norms, even if names can’t be measured in the same way as assets.

The concept is best understood by its opposite: category-natural cues. A waterfall logo, for instance, is category-natural for a water brand. By contrast, a waterfall logo for a car insurance brand is Category-Defiant. While this is an obvious example, category-natural cues can also include style, tone, or subtle cultural elements. Fiji Water’s hibiscus evokes nature and purity, fitting the category without being literal. On its own, it might have blended in—but paired with Fiji’s distinctive bottle shape, it becomes unique.

The practical application of Category-Defiant Distinctiveness involves a simple rule: raid your rivals to torch the patterns. Scour every competitor’s name, logo, and color, and actively reject those common traits. Only after this critical step can you use meaning to name a brand or design a unique brand asset. Then, cross-check every idea against those category patterns to ensure you always avoid them at all costs.

Achieving CDD doesn’t demand extremes like Liquid Death. Acqua Panna’s fleur-de-lis and S.Pellegrino’s star succeed with assets that are unexpected in their categories but still feel authentic for their brands. CDD can exist on a spectrum.

A Spectrum: Category-Natural → Category Defiant

The point is that meaning can’t—or shouldn’t—be avoided entirely. Symbols with rich cultural meaning can even strengthen a brand’s distinctiveness when used cleverly within its category.

John Deere and Apple are prime examples of Category-Defying Distinctiveness using symbols rich with cultural meaning. Deer are highly symbolic, but a deer made no sense for heavy machinery at the time. It wasn’t symbolic; it was simply distinctive. Meaning was built around it later (i.e., “Runs like a Deere”). Apple did the same thing. Apples are rich with symbology, but an apple in tech was nonsense, which was why it worked. The name wasn’t symbolic when it was conceived in 1976;* it was just disarmingly out of place.

EBI’s gold standard as a measurement outcome is a solid goal: for your assets to get recognized even outside your category. The problem lies in translating this finding into a creative prescription.

Most brands will never achieve the global, out-of-context fame of Apple, whose logo is instantly recognized and correctly attributed even on the back of a car window, completely removed from the context of computers or phones. However, high distinctiveness within the context of the category is more achievable and highly effective. EBI’s insistence on a “blank slate” overreaches, treating an ideal end-state as an initial design requirement.

Meaning-free distinctiveness sets the bar; Category-Defiant Distinctiveness builds the ladder to reach it.

*Despite endless lore about how Steve Jobs chose the name Apple—and how he later backfilled meaning into it with the Isaac Newton logo—the truth is simpler.

According to Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, Jobs said he “had just come back from the apple farm.” The name, he explained, “sounded fun, spirited, and not intimidating. Apple took the edge off the word computer—plus, it would get us ahead of Atari in the phone book.” He told Wozniak that if a better name didn’t hit them by the next afternoon, they’d stick with Apple—and they did.

The Tyranny of Meaning-First Design

Most brands crash because designers swoon over purpose and “perfect customers,” convinced meaning fuels growth. But shoppers can’t buy your saga if they don’t know you exist. Names and Distinctive Brand Assets (DBAs)—logos, colors, mascots—are brain hacks answering: “Who’s this from?”

This obsession with meaning—what I call brand strategy theater—often undermines the single most important thing that makes a brand stick: distinctiveness. Recognition leads; meaning tags along.

Why Brand Names & Assets Built On Differentiation Are Ticking Time Bombs

Brand names and assets built around differentiation are unstable. Differentiation can change; distinctiveness shouldn’t. Meaning and differentiation certainly have their place, but tying them to names or assets is risky.

Category Entry Points (CEPs) make this obvious. A CEP is any context that makes a consumer think about a category before brands enter the picture. A small business owner sending a newsletter is a CEP for “marketing tech.” A new CMO analyzing customer data is another.

Brands need their names and assets to work across every relevant CEP. In other words, names, logos, mascots, or other distinctive assets must be adaptable to any context. Differentiators often fail here. They can be context-dependent and may box brands in as they grow.

Differentiators flop in two epic ways when they’re treated as the north star for naming and design:

1. Blending In: Many differentiators are category-natural—predictable and easy to copy. A chiropractor using a lotus to signal wellness may seem different from one specializing in sports medicine, but wellness signaling is common, so it still blends in.

   

   

2. Boxed In: Anchoring assets to a differentiator limits growth. MailChimp launched as a simple email tool—a clear differentiator early on—but its name remains tied to email, limiting its ability to expand into broader marketing tech services. Monster Energy’s hyper-masculine identity works for some audiences and settings but falls flat in others—it appeals mainly to men and can feel out of place in professional contexts. Red Bull, by contrast, pairs a masculine name with playful, minimalist design and whimsical animations, letting its assets flex across audiences and situations. Category-Defiant Distinctiveness ensures the brand works in any context.

   

   

In short: differentiators fade, features blur, meaning shifts. Distinctiveness endures.

Distinctiveness: Differentiation’s Wingman

Meaning and differentiation aren’t irrelevant—they’re just harder to earn than most marketers admit. Differentiation is rare, costly, and fragile. Even giants never truly “own” a unique differentiator. The most successful brands achieve what Mark Ritson calls “relative differentiation”—just different enough relative to competitors in the buyer’s lens. Volvo is a bit safer than Toyota, Walmart is cheaper than Target, Apple is more fashionable than Samsung. Distinctiveness cements those tweaks in memory.

Marketers miss this when they treat distinctiveness and differentiation as enemies. Distinctiveness doesn’t replace meaning or differentiation—it supports them. It glues relative differences to the brand so they can be recalled later. Meaning isn’t the starting point; it’s a by-product of consistent, distinctive exposure.

Making Category-Defiant Distinctiveness (CDD) Sing: Strategic Filters and Safety Checks

Category-Defiant Distinctiveness doesn’t mean randomness. Unique names and assets still need checks to ensure they’re not just recognizable, but also work—clear enough to be understood and appealing enough to be liked. Distinctiveness without clarity confuses; distinctiveness without appeal repels.

You have to link the “out-of-place” to the right context so it’s both recognizable and clear. That connection doesn’t have to live inside the name or asset itself (a chiropractor doesn’t need a spine in their logo). Often, it comes from the surrounding context—how, where, and alongside what the brand shows up.

Two sets of filters make that happen: Category Identifiers, which ensure clarity, and Aesthetic Fit, which ensures the brand still feels right.

Category Identifiers: Ensuring Clarity

Every CDD asset must be paired with Category Identifiers—context that signals what the brand actually sells. Distinctiveness = “Who?” Identifiers = “What?” You need both.

Achieving close to 100% recognition outside any category context, like an Apple sticker on a car window, is less of a practical benchmark and more a fantasy—the branding version of a glittery dream board with a picture of you and a magazine cutout of Johnathan Taylor Thomas. 99.9% of brands will never come close.

Still, customers are distracted. Even if the category feels obvious to you, Category Identifiers are crucial for comprehension—some are designed deliberately, others come baked into the context.

Category Identifiers can take several forms:

• Baked-In: Default context clues. An elephant on an ice cream carton, sitting alongside other ice cream brands, still reads as ice cream. A donkey under a gas station canopy still reads as fuel.

• Added for Clarity: Supporting copy, descriptors under a brand name, or signage. Wendy’s red-headed girl, for example, was paired with a sign reading “Old-Fashioned Hamburgers” early on. If a women’s clothing boutique is named LampLight, the sign should include something like “Women’s Clothing Boutique” or “Women’s Fashion” so customers don’t mistake it for a lamp store.

  Note: Ensure the descriptor is large enough and legible enough to read. I see local shops in my town mess this up all the time.

• In-Use Context: Advertising the asset in use or in an explicit category environment, like the Snuggle bear inside a laundry basket on TV.

When paired with the spectrum of category-natural to Category-Defiant, these checks let brands push boundaries without losing comprehension. The further an asset leans toward Category-Defiant, the more it benefits from clear category cues to ensure recognition doesn’t come at the expense of understanding.

Baked In: Early Shell gas stations had a giant shell, which would have been confusing if it wasn’t paired with gas pumps.

Added For Clarity: One of the first Wendy’s locations featured a Category-Identifier nearly as large as the restaurant’s own name.

In Use Context: This cuddly little guy was always seen playing inside laundry baskets and snuggling with clothes.

Aesthetic Fit: Feel-Good Strangeness

Beyond category clarity, assets need to feel right to consumers and maintain a loose fit with the brand, or they risk turning people off or distracting from what the brand actually does. Category-Defiant Distinctiveness isn’t chaos—it’s controlled strangeness.

Well-designed names and assets balance distinctiveness with “feels right.” Associative undertones can reinforce without blending.

Example: Domino’s name and logo loosely fit the pizza category—they’re playful without being direct. But a domino wouldn’t work for a funeral home.

Three deeper filters help assets succeed:

1. Affective Association: Assets should generate positive affect. If a cue is too jarring, unpleasant, or off-putting, it fails to trigger the subtle System 1 signal that tells people, “I like this.” Even when an asset looks different from the category norm, it should still feel pleasing and enjoyable.

2. Loose Fit Across Brand, Category, and Customer: CDD assets can—and often should—carry implicit meaning that supports the brand, as long as the core idea remains Category-Defiant. Meaning doesn’t have to be explicit; it can be associative, aesthetic, or cultural, giving assets a familiar undertone without letting them blend in.

3. Avoid Confusion With Other Categories: Even the boldest CDD assets can backfire if they’re already claimed by a dominant brand in another field (e.g., a talking gecko for a soda brand could easily get confused with Geico), or by an entire category (e.g., a roof logo for a lawyer might still read “real estate” on a billboard).

The Point of All This

EBI’s work gave marketing the right measuring stick but the wrong creative brief. Meaning-free distinctiveness is useful as a diagnostic tool, not a design philosophy. It tells you how well your assets are recognized, not how to make them.

The mistake is thinking you can design a blank slate from scratch. You can’t. Distinctiveness is earned through exposure, not engineered through emptiness. Designers who start with “no meaning” end up with nothing memorable.

Category-Defiant Distinctiveness flips that script. It says: build assets that break your category’s conventions but still fit the brand. Be strange in the right way.

Meaning will come later, whether you want it to or not. The job isn’t to avoid it—it’s to make sure it forms around you instead of your category. That’s how you move from theory to practice, from measurement to memory.

Meaning-free distinctiveness is the destination. Category-Defiant Distinctiveness is how you get there.

For more thoughts on brand design, advertising, and marketing, you can find me on LinkedIn.

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I'm writing a book.

With my ADHD, telling people is the best way to ensure I actually finish it. So now you know: for the past couple of months, I've been working on a book, and I'm ready to share some early thoughts to get your feedback.

It's titled Show The Duck: The Hidden Power of Distinctiveness To Grow Brands.

Many assume “standing out” is a given. Most designers nod along to the idea of distinctiveness, yet we’re seeing less and less of it. There are plenty of reasons—“brand strategy theater” being the biggest—but the point is this: marketers, business owners, and designers need a reminder of what distinctiveness actually does for a brand.

This book is my attempt to restate what’s often taken for granted—to keep distinctiveness at the center of brand creation and growth, guided by what we know from marketing, advertising, behavioral, and memory science. Whether you’re naming your new business or designing for someone else’s, Show The Duck will be a reminder of why distinctiveness matters—and how to use it to grow a brand.

Here's a sneak peek at the introduction to the first chapter. I hope the world needs this book and that I see it through to the end. I may share more excerpts as I write.

An Excerpt From Show The Duck

Modern Branding Began With a Pig and a King.

Before 1916, grocery shopping was simple: shoppers handed a list to a clerk behind the counter who fetched each item. Brands like Quaker Oats or Coca-Cola were known only because of early advertising, but most goods weren’t even packaged—flour, sugar, and pickles were sold loose from barrels or bins. Brand recognition mattered little; trust was placed in the grocer, not the label.

Piggly Wiggly was about to change that.

The Pig

Piggly Wiggly was founded in 1916 by Clarence Saunders in Memphis, Tennessee. Saunders’ connection to groceries began early: at age nine, he worked holiday shifts at a local general store, cleaning and oiling kerosene lamps. By 14, he left school to work full-time, learning every corner of the business firsthand. At 19, he moved into grocery wholesaling, gaining deeper industry insight. By age 35, Saunders had a groundbreaking idea that would forever change the future of branding and retail.

By moving products from behind the counter onto open aisles, Saunders eliminated the need for most clerks, cutting labor costs and giving customers the freedom to browse and choose for themselves. Suddenly, brands were face-to-face with customers. Where once a friendly clerk stood between them—recommending products and guiding choices—now the brands had to earn trust on their own.

The King

Two decades after the first Piggly Wiggly, another visionary, Michael J. Cullen, built on Saunders’ innovation to create King Kullen, widely considered America’s first true supermarket.

In 1930s Queens, a grocery store boasting 6,000 square feet of shelf space—about half the size of a typical Walgreens today—opened its doors. Thousands lined up to experience it. Inside, shoppers were overwhelmed; some even fainted. Sixteen years later, when a similar store opened in Rome, a woman was seen running up and down the aisles, exclaiming, “It must be heaven! There are mountains of food!”

Today, shoppers navigate nearly infinite choices—the average supermarket stocks 50,000 products. Back in 1930s Queens, King Kullen’s mere 1,000 items felt like a “mountain of food.” Nobody could imagine a grocery store that big—except Michael Cullen, who had envisioned it more than 15 years before opening King Kullen.

Like Clarence Saunders, Cullen started young. He entered the grocery business at 18, sparking a lifelong passion that would reshape retail. By the time he married in 1913, he was already railing about his revolutionary supermarket idea. No one listened. Undeterred, he nurtured the dream for nearly two decades. Finally, in 1930, while a Kroger branch manager, he put it into writing—a formal letter to the company’s Vice President outlining the supermarket that would change retail.

In the letter, Cullen didn’t hold back. He promised Kroger he had an idea that would make them “the greatest chain grocery store on the face of the earth.” He said his plan would lead people out of “bondage” and into “the promised land.” He even predicted—correctly—that he “would have to call out the police, and let the public in so many at a time.”

For any doubters, Cullen had a ready retort: “Nobody ever flew the Atlantic either—until Lindbergh did it.”

And then…silence.

Cullen waited for a reply that never came. He didn’t know his letter had been misplaced by a subordinate, lost before it ever reached the VP’s desk. To Cullen, it looked like rejection.

So he did what people with unshakable confidence do: He walked away and built the future himself. That same year, Cullen opened King Kullen: the world’s first true supermarket. It was an instant success.

Distinctiveness is Now King.

A pig and a king set the stage for a shift that would fundamentally change how brands capture attention in a crowded market.

For over a century after the Piggly Wiggly and King Kullen, brands have grappled with a singular, crucial question: In a world overflowing with choice, what compels a shopper to select your brand over others?

The answers arrived in waves, each building upon its predecessor, but none encompassing the complete truth. In the 1960s, Rosser Reeves championed the Unique Selling Proposition—that singular, defensible claim distinguishing a brand. Later, in the 1970s and 1980s, marketing theorists Aaker and Keller directed our focus to brand equity: the intricate web of associations, perceptions, and loyalty. The 1990s saw Seth Godin highlight permission marketing and the pull of tribes, while in 2009, Simon Sinek urged brands to “start with why” and define a deeper purpose.

Each of these theories illuminated varying degrees of consumer behavior. However, beneath the surface of these compelling ideas, a more fundamental truth awaited discovery.

In 2010, marketing scientist Byron Sharp, director of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, ignited fierce debate in the branding world with his book How Brands Grow. He challenged long-held beliefs about loyalty, differentiation, targeting, and emotional connection. Not all of Sharp’s ideas are widely accepted today. But amid the controversy, one insight has gained near-universal agreement among marketers: distinctiveness grows brands. Brands that look and feel unmistakably themselves—consistently and repeatedly—are more likely to be remembered, recognized, and bought.

For those outside of the inner circle of marketing, distinctiveness is not differentiation.

Differentiation, Reeves argued, is about what you offer—a safer car, a greener sweater, a more durable widget. Distinctiveness is less about what you offer; it’s about the cues—colors, shapes, sounds—that make people recognize your brand instantly, whether on a shelf or in an ad.

While “standing out” has always felt like marketing 101, what’s often missed is how ridiculously powerful it can be on its own. Think of McDonald’s golden arches, glowing from half a mile away. The Geico Gecko—charming or annoying, you still remember him. Nike’s Just Do It. Intel’s little chime. These aren’t just brand identifiers. They’re memory hacks—built to stick, and over time, to quietly steer you toward one brand over another.

Brand recognition matters more than most marketers want to admit. People don’t analyze every purchase. They don’t fall in love with your brand story or get misty-eyed over your mission statement. Most choices happen on autopilot.

Behavioral science—and decades of real-world data from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and others—shows what’s really going on: when attention is low, people default to what they’ve seen before. The brands that show up in memory—even faintly—have the edge. Those little bits of branding are not just helping people recognize you. They’re helping them choose you, whether they realize it or not.

And yet, talk of distinctiveness rarely escapes marketing departments or academic papers. Differentiation has gone mainstream; distinctiveness is still stuck inside marketing. This book breaks that bubble.

It argues that distinctiveness is the foundation for growth in any brand—new or established, global or local, consumer or business-facing. A distinctive identity only works when it’s carried through everything a brand does—every ad, every package, every touchpoint. Recognition doesn’t come from a single moment of creativity but from showing up the same way, again and again, until the brand becomes impossible to miss.

Whether you are a small business owner navigating your market, a designer crafting visual identities, or a marketer at any level, this book will provide a new lens for many through which to view branding.

First, I will explain why distinctiveness matters, drawing insights from marketing science, behavioral science, memory theory, and compelling real-world examples.

Next, we’ll unearth the well-intentioned forces that stand in the way of distinctiveness. We’ll expose the popular myths and common beliefs—the “orthodoxies” of branding—that have quietly, almost imperceptibly, diverted brands from a core strategy they so desperately need. We’ll shine a light on how these well-intentioned but misguided ideas have, for decades, led brands astray.

Finally, I will outline a straightforward, practical approach for creating and building upon a distinctive brand from the ground up. This includes guidance on choosing names, designing logos or brand characters, picking a color scheme, and developing other brand assets that genuinely work in your favor. Many small business owners, understandably, treat their brand as a personal endeavor, selecting names and visuals that hold deep personal meaning. Others default to industry conventions—such as incorporating a spine into a chiropractor’s logo—believing that clear communication of what they do is paramount.

However, standing out often conflicts with deep meaning or perfect clarity. The goal isn’t to make people understand you—it’s to make them remember you. We’ll explore how breaking from your category’s patterns—whether it’s obvious clichés like scales in a law firm logo or subtler defaults like “handcrafted” logos and earth tones in organic food branding—can become the quiet but powerful edge your brand needs.

That’s what this book calls the duck—the name or branding element that might feel random, even out of place, but becomes a hack for memorability and recognition. Every brand needs its duck.

Ultimately, this book distills down to one essential objective: to be remembered. Because in a world saturated with options, distinctiveness is no longer an advantage—it’s a condition for survival. The story began with a pig and a king. Now it continues with a duck.

Enjoyed that? Unlock What The Duck!—Wild Branding Histories of Famous Names & Assets with a Paid Subscription

My book, Show The Duck will use a handful of origin stories—the Aflac Duck, Domino’s, SurveyMonkey’s name-change fiasco, and more—to illustrate the power of distinctiveness. Someday, I hope to compile 50 of these stories into a separate book devoted entirely to origin stories.

In the meantime, you can upgrade your Branding Bullsh*t subscription to access many of these stories through a paid series I’m calling What The Duck!—$6/month or $60/year.

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“Eye-catching and ear-bashing.” That’s how Peter Carlson with the Washington Post described Matthew Lesko back in 2007.1

If you were watching cable TV in the late 90s (in the U.S.) you couldn’t escape Matthew Lesko. He was loud, relentless, and unforgettable. But beyond the bright suits littered with question marks and wild claims, his brand holds profound, though sometimes uncomfortable, lessons for modern marketers. Let’s unpack Lesko’s origin story and discover why the secret to effective advertising lies in assuming everyone is “brushing their teeth” at all times.

A Cringe Star Is Born

Matthew Lesko was finally successful in the early 80s—but bored.

After a couple of failed businesses in the ‘70s, Lesko found his niche. “Some company called and said they wanted to start a chain of pasta stores and wanted to know what’s the market for pasta. I found a guy in the Commerce Department who studies the pasta industry. That’s all he does.”2

Lesko began to organize the free information he gathered from government experts for $10k to “fat cats” at Fortune 500 companies, but he grew tired of “helping rich people.” He also decided that his next venture had to be fun. “If I fail, f– it, it doesn’t matter.”3

This was the inciting incident that created a 90s icon.

The business idea came next. Lesko decided to take the same approach he used for corporations and apply it to everyday people by publishing books. His process was straightforward: he would simply gather the information, paste it between a custom-designed cover, and give it a title. “I didn’t write a lick,” Lesko claims.

Next, Lesko would contact the local news in small towns and book interviews on their newscasts.

Matthew Lesko saw every TV appearance as a challenge to hijack attention. When an anchor announced, “Up next, Matthew Lesko to talk about government information,” he ran a scene in his head: the viewer, bored by anything related to “government programs,” finally had a chance to get up, flick on the bathroom light, and start brushing their teeth to get ready for the day, barely listening.

Lesko engineered his performance for this perceived reality. He aimed for a level of sheer, wild distraction that would force the viewer to stop—mid-brush—and shout around the corner, “What’s that asshole talking about?”

The final touch was the costume.

For years, Lesko’s suits would slowly start to get a bit quirky here and there, but no question marks yet. When he appeared on Letterman in 1990, he looked entirely different from the iconic image that would become fossilized in our collective memory by the end of the decade.

By 1998, to prepare for his first ad campaign, Lesko took the plunge and ditched his expensive corporate suit for the cheapest one he could find. Then, he hired someone at a mall kiosk to embroider question marks all over it.

Matthew Lesko’s Guide to Attention: Reach, Distinctiveness, and the Cost of Cringe

Matthew Lesko wasn’t likable. He had a shit product. He was tacky. But he’s been booked on Oprah, Larry King, and Letterman, and has sold over 3 million copies of 100 books, tapes, and DVDs.

Most advertisers look down on people like Matthew Lesko. No creativity. No product. No class. And they’re right.

But the industry would be wise to take a page out of his book, even if many of those pages should be crumpled up and thrown in the trash—“Kobe!”

What can advertisers learn from Matthew Lesko?

1. Use The “Bathroom Rule” As Your Guide

Brands need to be seen, heard, and—most crucially—remembered. In today’s distracted world, the challenge isn’t just delivering an ad; it’s designing one that cuts through the mental noise.

The key lesson from Matthew Lesko’s high-impact advertising is what I’m calling the “Bathroom Rule”: Always assume your audience is mentally (or literally) in the bathroom around the corner brushing their teeth, and find a way to instantly command attention.

Every Second Must Count

If your brand is investing valuable ad spend, you cannot afford to be ignored. Your absolute priority must be ensuring that every second of your ad is unmistakably branded. This means sacrificing the common advertising mistake of slow-burn “storytelling” or emotional build-up at the expense of early brand identification.

Whenever a distracted viewer glances up, scrolls past, or returns their attention, they must immediately encounter your brand assets—logo, jingle, mascot, sonic logo, packaging. If you delay your branding, you are wasting precious airtime and budget on an ad that will be forgotten.

The Distinctive Power of Sound

While visual distinctiveness is critical, audio is an often-underestimated tool for cutting through when eyes are diverted.

Lesko himself, despite not having a specific sonic logo or jingle, used an overwhelming vocal energy and persona that was instantly recognizable, even if you weren’t looking at his famous question mark suit. He achieved audio distinctiveness through sheer intensity.

Other audio tools include:

• Jingles - According to research from Distinctive Bat, they are the single most effective form of brand asset for achieving both “fame” and “uniqueness.”4

• Sonic Logos - A short audio cue at the beginning of and end of an ad can ensure immediate recognition, even if subconscious.

• Brand Mascots - Despite not typically thought of as an audio asset without their bodies to accompany them, brand mascots like the Geico Gecko’s, with his British voice is instantly recognizable on American radio and podcasts. The Pillsbury Doughboy’s iconic chuckle or Colonel Sanders’ Southern draw also transform simple characters into audio brand signatures.

Whether you are trying to cut through on video when viewers are literally in the bathroom, capture the attention of those mindlessly scrolling social media, or invest in audio-only platforms, you cannot afford to waste a single dollar of ad spend.

By rigorously adhering to the “Bathroom Rule,” you force a valuable check on every ad production: If they only hear or see a flicker, will they know it was us? If the answer is no, you haven’t invested. You’ve gambled.

2. Win With Brute-Force Mental Availability

Matthew Lesko’s omnipresence in the 1990s offers a blueprint for achieving mental availability—being easily thought of—that is profoundly relevant to today’s media environment. Though he operated in a simpler era, his strategy of saturation is the core lesson for cutting through modern clutter.

Lesko’s loud, repetitive, and wild persona, over the course of years, ensured his message was seen. Today, consumers are bombarded with up to 100 ads per day across fragmented platforms.5

To maintain a consistent presence on consumers’ screens, you must invest in maximum reach targeting all category buyers. When resources are limited, maximize the budget you do have toward this goal. Since roughly 95% of potential category buyers are not in market at any given time,6 sales activation and performance marketing efforts inevitably plateau. To sustain market share growth, you must also invest in long-term brand-building.

From Reach To Attention

Showing up is the essential first step, but it is not enough. Once you get in front of eyeballs, you have to make every second count. The reality is bleak: According to Karen Nelson-Field, 85% of ads fail to reach the 2.5-second attention threshold for effectiveness,7 and active resistance is high (e.g., 64–66% of video ads and 46% of podcast ads are skipped8).

A primary reason for this lack of attention is a lack of distinctive branding. Ipsos estimates that only around 15% of brand assets are “truly distinctive.”9 This is both bad and good news. It’s bad because, statistically, your current assets likely blend in. But it’s good because distinctiveness is arguably easier than ever to achieve.

Consistent creative devices and distinctive brand assets—or “fluent Devices,” as coined by System1 Group and Orlando Wood—have been on a steep decline in recent years, yet they are 23% more likely to generate very large market share gain, and 22% more likely to generate very large profit gain effects.10

The world is saturated with subtle, look-alike branding. Seize the opportunity to stand out. It’s time to invest in distinctiveness (I got your back). Matthew Lesko’s ultimate lesson is clear: Brute-force mental availability can sometimes overcome poor execution.

3. Be Careful Of Cringe

While Lesko achieved the essential goal of reach, his methods came at a steep price: inefficiency.

Lesko’s biggest error was systematically alienating the light buyer—the “workhorses” of brand growth responsible for half of a brand’s revenue.11 His cringe persona and the unbelievable claims about “free money”—which he admitted few people actually received, with a whopping 10% of buyers returning his products—actively repelled many in this massive group.

This failure is explained by the principle of “counter-argument,” a trap warned against by advertising psychologist Robert Heath.12

According to Heath, advertising that is overly emotional (like social purpose campaigns), aggressive, or unbelievable causes viewers to roll their eyes. This resistance makes them less likely to buy, not more.

In the 1990s, Lesko succeeded only because his immense reach on cheap cable time compensated for his inherently low conversion rate. Heath suggests using “covert emotion”—subtle, enjoyable branding (such as the Geico Gecko)—to build brand association without generating the audience resistance that destroyed Lesko’s efficiency.

Where Is Matthew Lesko Now?

So, where is Matthew Lesko now? Still doing his thing.

I actually met Matthew Lesko back in 2011. He was promoting a documentary someone else made about him. Both his documentary and my own were selections in the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival. Lesko’s documentary was eventually picked up by Vice and released a few years later. Mine was not.*

In person, Lasko was far less cloying. Dare I say, he was even pleasant to talk to. I don’t remember what we talked about for those couple of minutes, but at the time, I hadn’t seen him on my TV in a decade or longer. In fact, he hasn’t reappeared on my TV screen since.

Lesko’s reliance on traditional ad spend seems to have ended shortly after the early 2000s. By 2007, he was already contacting freelancers on Craigslist to produce cheaper ads. But he’s proven to be a media chameleon. At 82, he’s found a new home on YouTube, where his channel has over 340,000 subscribers. In fact, he’s so active that he uploaded a new video while I was writing this.

*The Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival is one of the most prestigious documentary film festivals in the world, but my film—which was just a college project—was selected as part of a showcase of local documentaries made in Arkansas.

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We know distinctive brand assets—logos, brand mascots, jingles, taglines, etc.—drive growth... in consumer brands. But I often think about how distinctiveness shows up outside of products and services.

Horror Classics vs. Christmas Classics

A few years ago, I analyzed how Christmas movies grow. I looked at the highest-grossing films (adjusted for inflation), opening weekend performance, and surveys of today’s most beloved holiday classics. A few patterns stood out:

• Opening weekend predicted long-term success.

• Critical acclaim barely mattered—Home Alone 2 has an abysmal Rotten Tomatoes score. For shame!

• Star power helped enormously.

• Sequels almost always performed well.

• Box office flops often found new life as annual TV staples (A Christmas Story, It’s a Wonderful Life) during a time with far fewer options than today.

Most importantly, pre-existing fame and uniqueness drove success. Rudolph built on the popularity of the song, The Santa Clause leveraged perhaps the most famous and instantly recognizable “mascot” of all time—Santa—and other films drew on well-known characters from other genres, like the Muppets or Charlie Brown. The only truly original hit was Home Alone—even its producers were blindsided by its success on opening weekend.

In other words, Christmas movie success relied on:

• Mental availability: pre-existing iconic characters, sequels, songs

• Physical availability: marketing budgets, opening weekend sales, VHS/DVD distribution, and yearly TV reruns

In every film, distinctiveness played a critical role in its success, but ultimately, that distinctiveness was not built from scratch.

Horror films flip that logic. Their success rarely starts with familiarity—it starts with distinctiveness. The most famous franchises launched with something radically unique: a sound, a mask, or a memorable line.

Christmas films relied on distinctiveness, but it was inherited. Santa’s red suit, flying reindeer, Charlie Brown’s yellow-and-black shirt—all existed before the films. Horror had to invent its assets from scratch: masks, costumes, theme songs, and villains were born on screen.

Horror Classics vs. Consumer Brands

A great filmmaker knows how to captivate an audience; a great brander knows how to be remembered. Filmmakers often overlook the commercial power of distinctiveness, focusing instead on emotional impact. Branders frequently do the same—but without the same payoff. For filmmakers, emotion is the goal. For brands, it’s a means to an end. And audiences know the difference.

Viewers accept that films are meant to move them, even if they also make money. No one expects that from a brand. Brands don’t get two hours of attention—they get seconds. That’s why distinctiveness works differently in each world.

In branding, distinctiveness is much less an artistic choice and more a deliberate tool for recognition. A logo doesn’t need to make you feel something in the moment; it just needs to trigger everything you already feel toward the brand. The Apple logo doesn’t need to look innovative or inspire emotion on its own—if not for the brand built around it, it could just as easily belong to an elementary school.

Filmmaking is different. Its distinctive assets—like a mask or theme song—have to do something on their own. A Halloween mask has to be both scary and memorable. A score has to reinforce the emotion as it unfolds. But filmmakers could learn something from brand science, too. The most iconic movies, especially horror films, don’t rely on emotion alone—they build instantly recognizable cues that burn into memory. A mask, a sound, an iconic movie line. Deliberate distinctiveness doesn’t dull emotion—it anchors it, making sure the feeling lasts long after the credits roll.

Types of Distinctive Brand Assets In Film

This article isn’t about how Halloween movies grow, but how they were born—and how accidents of design became enduring assets. Horror films with unusual visual or audio traits were far more likely to become classics or evolve into franchises. Many of those traits were chosen on a whim, yet became inseparable from the films’ identity.

Just like consumer brands, horror films rely on recognizable cues to stay in memory. Their distinctive brand assets just take different forms:

• Mascots → Costumes

• Taglines → Famous movie lines and film taglines

• Jingles → Theme songs

• Advertising styles → visual motifs

• Logos → Movie posters

Both films and brands rely on repetition and distinctiveness to anchor these cues in memory—the difference is in how those cues are created. Filmmakers often stumble into them, while brands try to engineer them.

I’d love to see more filmmakers take a page from marketing science and design their distinctiveness deliberately, rather than by accident.

But enough theory—let’s get to the real reason you clicked on this article: the backstories behind these iconic Halloween assets.

Brand Assets: Costumes

Brand mascots are known to be one of the most powerful assets for consumer brands. The same can definitely be said for the costumes that made horror classics famous.

Ghostface - Scream

In the Scream franchise, the killers target teens whose deaths follow the “unwritten rules” of classic horror movies—rules like never have sex, never drink or do drugs, and never say “I’ll be right back.” Each murder plays out as both a parody and a tribute to the slasher genre’s clichés, turning the film itself into a self-aware commentary on horror tropes.

“Ghostface” is the costume worn by various killers throughout the Scream franchise. Within the film, it had to be something any would-be killer could buy off the rack—ordinary enough to be believable, but eerie enough to stick in memory. That’s almost exactly how Marianne Maddalena, one of the film’s producers, discovered it in real life—though the story was far more accidental.

Three weeks before shooting, Wes Craven, Maddalena, and the rest of the Scream team were still struggling to design the mask that would become the star of the film.

Then, during a location scout, Maddalena stumbled upon it by accident—sitting on a chair in a boy’s bedroom in one of the houses they were considering for the shoot.1 It was the exact mask that would end up in the final film, though with a white shroud. She’d stumbled onto the “Wailing Ghost” mask, made by the costume company Fun World.

She ran downstairs to show the team, ecstatic. They weren’t impressed. “No, we’re going to make our own,” they replied. Somehow, no one seemed to grasp just how absurdly lucky it was—that the perfect mask they’d been struggling to create was simply sitting there, waiting, while they were out scouting for a house.

The team resisted the found mask for another couple of weeks, until Maddalena raised it again, hoping the homeowner still had it. Craven finally relented: “Ok… but I want to make some alterations.”

There was still one obstacle—the rights belonged to Fun World, the mask’s producer. Dimension executive Cary Granat initiated negotiations that same day. Meanwhile, the crew experimented with altered versions. When shooting began, they used a slightly modified mask, but soon realized the original worked best and went back to replace the shots with the Fun World version. By now, the rights to Ghostface must be worth millions. Scream only paid around $30,000 for them.

The rest of the costume was also a challenge. According to Maddalena, Craven was “not a happy camper” when he first read the script, which only described the killer as wearing a “ghostly white mask.” He worried: “How do you hide the feet? How do you hide the hands?”

The team experimented with a black turtleneck and other ideas before settling on a… white robe?

Once again, Maddalena provided the crucial suggestion, recommending a black robe for maximum scare factor—an idea that would stick.

Michael Myers - Halloween

Halloween was shot on a shoestring budget, yet went on to become the highest-grossing independent film of all time when it was released in 1978.

In the film, Michael Myers escapes from a mental hospital to kill his sister, after murdering the rest of their family as a boy. In the script, the adult killer was described as having a “blank face.”

With almost no money for props, Tommy Lee Wallace was sent to find a mask at a local costume shop—and stumbled upon a Captain Kirk mask from Star Trek.

According to William Shatner, the mask Wallace found was actually a replica of a “death mask” used on the Star Trek set—a placeholder so Shatner wouldn’t need to be on set for scenes where his character had to look older or altered in some way.

Wallace modified the mask by cutting larger eye holes, removing the eyebrows and sideburns, painting the face white, and darkening the hair.

The crew tested two options: a sad clown mask, which everyone agreed was “eerie,” and the altered Captain Kirk mask. When someone tried the latter on, the reaction was instant. “We were all like, ‘oh, fuck me,’” Wallace recalled. The Kirk mask was terrifying—and instantly iconic.

As for the rest of the costume, the origin wasn’t nearly as random as the mask. Myers’ dark grey coveralls came straight from the story itself—he kills a mechanic early in the film and takes his clothes as his own.

Jason Vorhees - Friday The 13th

If you’re like me, you might forget that Jason’s iconic hockey mask didn’t appear until Friday the 13th Part III.

In the first film, the killer murders several teenage counselors trying to reopen an abandoned summer camp in 1980 after a tragic incident decades earlier. In Part II—which takes place five years after the first film—Jason Voorhees picks up where things left off, killing more teenagers at the same camp. Part III begins right after, with Jason murdering a shop owner, stealing his clothes, and continuing his rampage at a nearby lake house.

The filmmakers have openly admitted they borrowed the whole Friday the 13th concept from Halloween, so it’s fitting they borrowed that detail too—having the killer take the clothes of someone he’d just murdered. To be fair, it’s also a pretty practical move when you need new clothes and you’re committed to killing teenagers.

Of course, no one talks about Jason’s costume from the neck down. Whereas Michael Myers’ coveralls are fairly distinct, Jason’s green button down and jeans are pretty generic and have changed a lot over the years. What really makes Jason Vorhees an iconic movie mascot is his hockey mask.

In Friday the 13th Part II, Jason wore a sack over his head. By Part III, the script said he’d wear a mask—but no one had decided what kind.

During a lighting test one day, director Steve Miner needed Jason in frame, but no one wanted to bother with makeup. So, they grabbed the first mask they could find. As luck would have it, the film’s 3D effects supervisor, Martin Jay Sadoff—a die-hard hockey player—had his hockey gear with him on set that day. Inside his bag was a Detroit Red Wings goalie mask. They threw it on Richard Brooker (who played Jason) just for the test.2

It worked. Miner instantly loved the look, but the mask was too small. The crew enlarged it, made new molds, and production assistant Terry Ballard added red triangles, new holes, and subtle changes to make it unique. What started as a lazy workaround during a lighting check became one of the most iconic masks in movie history.

Hannibal Lector - Silence Of The Lambs

In The Silence of the Lambs, Dr. Hannibal Lecter—a brilliant psychiatrist and convicted cannibal—is held in a maximum-security psychiatric facility for the criminally insane. Clarice Starling, a young FBI trainee played by Jodie Foster, is sent to interview him in hopes of gaining insight into the mind of another serial killer known as Buffalo Bill.

The mask makes its appearance during Lecter’s transfer from Baltimore State Hospital to a temporary holding cell inside a Tennessee courthouse. The transfer is arranged after he agrees to help Starling and the FBI with the case. To prevent him from biting or attacking anyone, the guards restrain him with a straightjacket and fit him with the now-iconic muzzle-like mask.

It’s the only time in the series that Lecter wears the mask, but the image was chilling enough to make it instantly iconic and one of the most recognizable visuals in film history.

Like the Scream mask, coming up with Lector’s iconic mask took trial and error. Kristi Zea, the production designer for The Silence of the Lambs, called it “an interesting dilemma.”3

Costume designer Colleen Atwood and the team tried a range of ideas—some genuinely creepy, others unintentionally funny. Hopkins tested several different masks, including fencing-style grids and medical restraints, but none felt right.

@alltherightmoviesAnthony Hopkins screen testing his Hannibal Lecter mask options for THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS.

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Eventually, they decided to make something original. The plan was to give the mask a smooth finish, but when the fiberglass prototype arrived, it looked rough and weathered, almost like dried leather or skin. They kept it that way, and that unfinished sample became the final mask seen in the film.

Freddy Krueger - A Nightmare On Elm Street

Inspired by news reports of a Cambodian refugee who mysteriously died in his sleep after suffering recurring nightmares—a phenomenon that reportedly affected others in the same community—A Nightmare on Elm Street follows a group of teenagers in Springwood, Ohio, hunted in their dreams by Freddy Krueger, a burned man with a glove of razor blades. What happens in their dreams kills them in real life, forcing them to stay awake just to survive.

By 1982, after the success of Halloween and Friday the 13th, the slasher genre was already crowded. Wes Craven wanted to make something different—something psychological. He also wanted to do what most slasher directors avoided: show the killer’s face.

The Fedora

Freddy’s fedora came from Craven’s own childhood. One night, as a boy, he woke to see a drunk man wearing a fedora standing on the sidewalk outside his window, staring up at him. “He just basically somehow knew I was up there,” Craven recalled. “He looked right into my eyes.” Craven ducked out of sight, then looked again after what felt like hours—the man was still there, only now he was walking slowly backward down the street while keeping eye contact. Then he turned the corner—toward the entrance of Craven’s apartment building. Moments later, Craven heard the door open downstairs. He grabbed a baseball bat with his brother, but found no one. That image stayed with him.4

The Sweater

The red-and-green sweater was chosen more scientifically. Craven had read in Scientific American that red and green were the most clashing color combination to the human eye. It seemed fitting for a horror film.5

The Knife Glove

Freddy’s bladed glove was part instinct, part biology. Craven wanted to combine humanity’s primal fear of claws and sharp edges with one of its most evolved traits: hands. But the prop itself was dangerous—according to mechanical effects designer Jim Doyle, “Every time someone put it on, they hurt themselves. If you closed your fist, the blades cut your forearm.”

The Face

Freddy’s grotesque burns came from a slice of pizza. Makeup artist David Miller recalled: “The final design for Freddy was based on a pepperoni pizza. I was having dinner one night, playing with the cheese and pepperoni, and I realized—I’d just made Freddy’s face.”

Sam - Trick R’ Treat

You’ve probably started seeing Sam more often in recent years, appearing alongside more well-known Halloween characters in decorations and displays. If you’re not a horror fan, though, you might not know who he is.

Sam is the pint-sized enforcer from Trick ’r Treat, a film structured as an anthology of Halloween stories. He punishes anyone who fails to honor the spirit of the holiday, serving as a unifying thread across the film’s separate tales.

What makes Sam unique is that he may be the only truly intentional “mascot” created for a horror film. He was designed by writer-director Michael Dougherty for his NYU animated thesis film, Season’s Greetings. According to Dougherty in a documentary interview about the film, his goal was straightforward: “Every holiday has a cool mascot. Halloween is the only one that didn’t. There are iconic images, but not a single mascot character.”6

For authenticity, Sam was played by a real 7-year-old, giving his movements a natural, childlike quality. As for what truly lurks beneath the costume—you’ll have to watch the film to see the surprise for yourself.

Brand Assets: Theme Songs

Jingles are another powerful distinctive brand asset for consumer brands. The same can be said for movie theme songs and motifs.

“Tubular Bells” - The Exorcist

Tubular Bells is best known as the theme from The Exorcist, but it actually comes from a groundbreaking instrumental progressive rock album written by Mike Oldfield, who began composing it at just 17. Its unusual 15/8 time signature was virtually unheard of in rock at the time, and its mix of bells and slowed-down electric guitars helped pave the way for the New Age music movement.7

When director William Friedkin was searching for a score for The Exorcist, he’d commissioned music he didn’t like. He wanted something “akin to Brahms’ Lullaby” to evoke a sense of childhood. After consulting the head of Warner Bros., he was sent to the studio’s music library down the hall, where he discovered Tubular Bells. Warner Bros. had little interest in the album, so Friedkin acquired the rights himself.8 When The Exorcist premiered, the album exploded in popularity, eventually becoming one of the best-selling albums of all time.

“I Got 5 On It” - Us

Us (2019), from Key & Peele co-creator turned horror auteur Jordan Peele, follows a vacationing family terrorized by another family that looks exactly like them. It’s only been six years since its release, but the comparisons between Peele and Hitchcock already feel earned—and I’d bet Get Out, Us, and Nope will all be considered classics within the decade.

The film is loaded with instantly recognizable visual cues—from gloved hands wielding scissors to the now-iconic red coveralls, which feel like a modern extension of a horror villain tradition. But one of its most striking cues is actually auditory: the main theme, a haunting horror remix of Luniz’s 1995 hit “I’ve Got 5 On It.”

The remix wasn’t originally made for the film itself—it was composed for the official trailer by Michael Abels. Audience reaction was so strong that Peele decided to integrate it as the film’s central musical motif. He had long felt the song carried an eerie undertone. In an interview about his choice for the trailer, he said, “I love songs that have a great feeling but also a haunting element to them, and I feel like the beat in that song has this inherent cryptic energy, almost reminiscent of the Nightmare on Elm Street soundtrack.”9

Interestingly, in an episode of The Empire Film Podcast, Peele revealed that the final fight scene was originally filmed with Pas de Deux from The Nutcracker as its score, highlighting how the film’s music evolved into the memorable, unsettling motif audiences now associate with Us.10

Since discovering the eerie potency of I’ve Got 5 On It, Peele has continued the trend—turning the 80s pop hit Sunglasses at Night into a haunting motif in his most recent film Nope, weaving it through the film’s most suspenseful moments. The collaboration between Jordan Peele and composer Michael Abels has already drawn comparisons to Steven Spielberg and John Williams… by Spielberg himself.11

Ch, Ch, Ch, Ah, Ah, Ah (Actually Ki, Ki, Ki, Ma, Ma, Ma) - Friday The 13th

In the original Friday the 13th, several scenes are shot from the killer’s perspective, with a subtle camera wobble to convey the viewpoint. On a practical level, composer Harry Manfredini created a musical motif to immediately signal whose eyes the audience was seeing through—so viewers knew within seconds it was the killer’s perspective.

The sounds in that iconic motif were debated for years—until Manfredini finally clarified what was being said.

Spoiler warning: Skip to the next section on movie lines if you don’t want the original film’s ending spoiled.

In the story, the tragic incident at the heart of the plot is the drowning of a young boy, Jason, at the camp. He was thrown into the lake and went undiscovered due to the negligence of the counselors. The killer in the first film—who Jason Vorhees succeeds in later installments—is his mother, Pamela Vorhees.

Toward the film’s climax, Pamela chases a teenage girl and utters, in a childlike voice, “Kill her, mommy.” This suggests she is hearing her son’s voice in her head as she hunts her victims.

Manfredini used that line as the basis for Jason’s motif. He took the first two letters of the first and last words of Pamela’s hallucination—“Ki…ma”—recorded them himself, and then distorted them into the haunting audio cue that became synonymous with the series. The motif signals that, with every kill, Pamela is guided by the imagined voice of her son.

Brand Assets: Movie Lines

Certain movie lines stick in our minds long after the credits roll, becoming shorthand for the film itself. Like distinctive brand assets, they instantly trigger recognition and recall, carrying the story—and the emotion—of the movie in just a few words.

Most movie lines get misattributed or forgotten over time. These are unmistakable.

“Here’s Johnny” - The Shining

The Shining has no mascot, franchise, or a particularly strong theme song, yet it’s often hailed as one of the greatest horror films ever made. Few would argue that Stanley Kubrick isn’t a genius or that this isn’t among his best work.

The film follows Jack Torrence, a man hired to be the caretaker of a sprawling ski resort. He brings his wife and young son, hoping the isolation will help him finish his latest novel. Meanwhile, his son begins experiencing supernatural phenomena and discovers he is telepathic, able to sense a mysterious force called “the shining.” Over time, Jack slowly descends into madness, culminating in a murderous rampage against his own family.

According to a study that tracked viewers’ heart rates and asked them to rate the films that scared them most, the scariest movie moment of all time is Jack Nicholson’s “Here’s Johnny” scene. Jack bursts through a door, peers through the splintered hole, and grins maniacally while chasing his wife and son with an ax.12

That line became legendary thanks to Nicholson’s improvisation—he ad-libbed it on the spot. There’s a clever cultural layer, too: in 1980, audiences would have instantly recognized the reference to The Tonight Show, which opened with Ed McMahon—perhaps better known to some 90s kids from The Price Is Right—calling out, “Here’s Johnny!” before Johnny Carson appeared through a rainbow-colored curtain. Kubrick twists that cheerful, familiar phrase into pure terror.13

“It’s Alive!” - Frankenstein

The line “It’s alive!” is famously shouted by Dr. Frankenstein after his creation springs to life. In Mary Shelley’s original novel, Frankenstein reacts with terror and revulsion, recoiling from what he has made. The 1931 film flips that reaction: here, he exclaims with pride and triumph, celebrating his achievement rather than fearing it.

The line is often spoofed with a thunderclap immediately following it—but that iconic punch was partly a workaround. The original line continued: “In the name of God, now I know what it feels like to BE God!” This second half was censored to secure a seal from the Production Code Administration (PCA), which deemed it offensive to Christian audiences. To hide the excised line, the filmmakers used a jump cut and a loud clap of thunder immediately after “It’s alive!”

Before the censorship, the film had attempted to placate the PCA with an opening narration describing Frankenstein as “a man of science who sought to create a man after his own image without reckoning upon God.” It wasn’t enough. The second half of the line was removed, and remained unknown to the public until it was rediscovered in the 1980s.14

“I Ate His Liver With Some Fava Beans And A Nice Chianti” - Silence Of The Lambs

When Hannibal Lecter warns Clarice Starling not to “test me,” he recounts the fate of the last person who did—a census taker, murdered and served as a meal. He chillingly adds that he “ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti.”

Even more unsettling than the idea of a human liver with fava beans and a fine chianti is the hiss Anthony Hopkins adds at the end. That chilling sound wasn’t scripted; Hopkins had been joking around with the hiss on set, and its inclusion here turned it into one of the most unnerving touches in cinematic history.15

There’s another layer to the line. Reddit sleuths have noted that liver, fava beans, and wine—all high in tyramine—can dangerously interact with monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs), a drug that could have treated Lecter’s own condition. The implication being that Lecter was likely off his meds when he killed the census taker.16 Whether the filmmakers included this detail knowingly remains unknown.

The Power Of Unplanned Creativity

From masks and costumes to theme songs and unforgettable lines, horror films show how powerful distinctive assets can be—sometimes by accident, sometimes by design. Unlike consumer brands, which carefully engineer recognition, many of these iconic horror cues were improvised, stumbled upon, or discovered by sheer luck. And yet, they endure, becoming instantly recognizable shorthand for the films themselves.

Whether it’s Michael Myers’ altered Captain Kirk mask, Jason Vorhees’ goalie helmet, or Hannibal Lecter’s muzzle, these assets demonstrate that distinctiveness—when repeated and reinforced—anchors a story in our memory. Audiences don’t need a full two-hour explanation; a single visual, sound, or line can trigger the entire narrative in an instant.

The lesson isn’t just for filmmakers to lean on marketing science to manufacture memorable assets. Branders could take a page from the horror playbook: embrace a little randomness, experiment under constraints, and leave room for accidents. Sometimes the quirkiest, most improvised choices become the elements people remember most. Unplanned creativity, when recognized and amplified, can create assets that are far more memorable—and iconic—than anything fully scripted.

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“Pringles’ original intention was to make tennis balls... But on the day the rubber was supposed to show up, a truckload of potatoes came.

Pringles is a laid-back company, so they just said ‘F*ck it, cut em up!’”

Or so goes the joke by the late comedian Mitch Hedberg.

Pringles wasn’t founded by a tennis ball company—but it was created by a soap manufacturer. And the story only gets stranger from there.

In fact, Pringles might be the most over-engineered snack ever made: a lab-built chip developed in the 1950s by a chemist who, decades later, requested to be buried in one of its cans.

From a failed taste test and early competitor backlash over semantics that required the U.S. Food & Drug Administration to intervene, to a pre-fame Brad Pitt cameo and a Wikipedia prank that accidentally renamed its mascot, this is the bizarre history of one of the world’s most recognizable snack brands.

The Signature Shape

In the mid-1950s, Procter & Gamble—known mostly for soap at the time—tasked a chemist named Fredric J. Baur with fixing everything wrong with potato chips. He set out to create one that wouldn’t break so easily, wasn’t greasy, stayed fresh longer, and didn’t need to be shipped in a bag of air.1

At the time, P&G had just begun expanding into food and quickly became the world’s largest supplier of frying oil to chip makers. Making their own chip seemed logical. But by 1958, the project was shelved. Baur had nailed the shape and texture—but not the taste.

He was still so proud of the design that decades later he asked to be buried in a Pringles can. His family thought he was kidding. He wasn’t. When he died in 2008 at 89, they fulfilled his request.

In the mid-1960s, P&G revived the perfect potato project with chemist Alexander Liepa. But the machine that made Pringles possible came from a different kind of mind entirely: Gene Wolfe, a Catholic science fiction writer who also worked as an engineer at the time. Wolfe, best known for The Book of the New Sun and praised by writers like Neil Gaiman as one of the genre’s masters, helped design the system that baked the chips into their signature hyperbolic paraboloid shape.2

By 1968, after a few test launches, Pringles finally hit the market. But the road from development to market testing wasn’t easy.

The Origin Of The Name

The brand’s early challenges weren’t limited to the chips themselves. Naming the chip would prove to be a roller coaster ride as well.

There are a few competing stories about how Pringles got its name. The most credible comes from P&G itself. In a 1969 interview with the Chicago Daily News Service about a trademark dispute (more on that in a bit), the company said the name was pulled “out of a hat.”3 They liked that it sounded like a family name and felt familiar enough to make people less wary of their “newfangled” potato chips.

Another theory suggests the brand was named after Mark Pringle, an engineer who once patented a device in the 1930s that was later used in Pringles production.

And then there’s the story that two P&G ad guys came up with the name after driving past Pringles Drive in Cincinnati.4 Whichever story you believe, one thing’s clear: none of it involved the kind of brand strategy theater we’d see today.

Problems With The Name

When Pringles hit test markets, trouble started immediately—the name was already taken. General Foods had trademarked “Pringles” for a popcorn-based chip of their own.

P&G didn’t have much leverage. P&G had tested the product without filing a trademark, leaving them blindsided. The companies eventually settled, with General Foods renaming their product. P&G never accused them of espionage outright, but given the era’s snack wars, it wouldn’t be far-fetched to think they locked down the name just to make P&G pay for it.

Ironically, decades later, Pringles toyed with releasing a popcorn version of their chip—a full-circle moment that never quite popped.

But the headaches didn’t stop there. At launch, the full name was “Pringles Newfangled Potato Chips.” Competitors quickly cried foul, arguing Pringles weren’t “real” potato chips since they were made from potato dough, not cut potatoes.

In 1975, the FDA agreed: Pringles didn’t meet the oddly specific definition of a “potato chip.” The brand was forced to call them “potato crisps” or include the disclaimer “made from dried potatoes” anywhere the word “chip” appeared.5

The label they fought to keep in the ’70s was one they’d argue against in 2008.

That year, the UK introduced a 17% value-added tax on “potato crisps” (the British term for chips) and any snacks made from potatoes. Pringles’ lawyers argued the brand shouldn’t qualify because the chips were only 42% potato and that their shape “is not found in nature.” The High Court actually agreed, but an appeal later overturned the ruling, and P&G had to pay up.6

“Once You Pop”

Pringles’ marketing history had as many false starts as the product itself. After a few weak taglines and failed jingles—including a 1989 ad starring an unknown Brad Pitt—Pringles struck gold in the ’90s with one of the most memorable lines in advertising.

What started out as “Once you pop, you can’t stop,” became “Once you pop, the fun don’t stop” by the late ’90s.

After the 2000s, Pringles went mostly quiet, pulling back on ad spend. Then in 2022, they came back loud—with their biggest budget in years. It was a perfect setup for nostalgia and resurrecting old brand cues. Instead, in true modern fashion, Pringles got restless and tried to fix what wasn’t broken with a new tagline: “Mind Popping.”

At the time, one expert posited to Marketing Interactive the change may have been because the old line clashed with today’s ”mindful eating concepts.”

Wow. I need a minute to process how far gone the ad industry is.

According Grey London, the agency behind the change, “Mind Popping” was inspired by “mind-blowing” trivia they uncovered about Pringles—like how sci-fi author Gene Wolf helped invent its baking machine, the universe supposedly mirrors its shape, and the chip “perfectly fits the tongue.”7

Despite being billed as Pringles’ new permanent tagline—not just a campaign line—“Mind Popping” was short-lived. Since then, the brand has bounced back with a few standout Super Bowl ads that leaned on the brand’s other strengths—the mascot and shape of the can. I ranked those spots #3 in my annual Super Bowl Winners and Losers lists in 2023 and 2024, and #7 in 2025. Still, Pringles hasn’t brought back its most recognizable line.

Mr. Pringle (AKA Mr. Pringles, AKA Mr. P, AKA Julius Pringles)

The Pringles mascot has been part of the brand since day one—first as a logo, then, by 1973, appearing in at least one campaign as a spokesperson named “Mr. Pringle.”

The logo was designed to depict an old-fashioned baker, matching the Pringles name, which P&G thought sounded like a family name. His head was shaped like a Pringles chip.

John Oliver once joked that Mr. Pringles looked like “a hard-boiled egg disguised as Tom Selleck.” And if you’ve ever wondered what the rest of his body looks like, Oliver did too.

After the comedian pressed Pringles to reveal his mysterious body, the company finally responded. I doubt John Oliver was impressed—they had a perfect setup and still managed to make it unfunny.

“Mr. Pringles” has largely stayed the same over the years. Things didn’t get truly interesting until 2013.

Before 2013, the Pringles mascot didn’t have a first name—he was just “Mr. Pringle.” The idea for a new name started in 2006, when two college friends, watching American football, joked about what the Pringles man might be called. When football player Julius Peppers came on screen, they cracked up imagining his name as “Julius Pringles.”

One of the friends, Justin Shillock, who was an active Wikipedia contributor, added the name to the Pringles page as a joke. The edit was caught and deleted a year later, but Shillock put it back. With his established reputation on Wikipedia, it went unquestioned until 2012, when Kellogg’s acquired Pringles from P&G and an employee began using the name “Julius Pringles” in marketing campaigns, unaware it was fabricated.8 By 2013, the company officially renamed their mascot Julius Pringles, though today he’s often called “Mr. P” (not to be confused with Master P).

After a brief moment in the spotlight in 2013, the mascot receded again—until 2020, when Jones Knowles Ritchie overhauled the logo, streamlining it for screens while keeping it instantly recognizable.

Recent Pringles Mascot Moves

Recently, Pringles has started leaning into their mascot more. In 2024, Chris Pratt starred in a Super Bowl ad as a fictionalized version of Mr. P—first joking that he looked like the Pringles guy, then eventually being cast by his agent to play the character in a mock movie about the mascot. It’d be fun if they made it a recurring thing, like KFC does with Colonel Sanders—rotating different celebrities in the role. Maybe, while they’re at it, they could finally embrace his first name and stop calling him “Mr. P?”

In 2025, Pringles brought the mascot back for the Super Bowl, this time featuring a gag where celebrity mustaches flew off their faces after someone who ran out of Pringles blew into the can.

Unfortunately, the ad probably didn’t land as effectively as intended. By coincidence, Little Caesar’s ran a similar spot where Eugene Levy’s eyebrows flew off, and with viewers’ attention divided, it’s easy to see how the two could be confused.

Pringles deserves credit for finally leaning into their logo and turning him into a playable mascot. Marketing scientists and mascot lovers should be proud.

Pringles didn’t start as a gimmick, a tennis ball, or a carefully orchestrated brand strategy—it was the product of chemistry, accidents, and a bit of chaos. From a chemist obsessed with shape, to trademark battles, FDA debates, viral Wikipedia pranks, and a mascot with more names than most people, the story of Pringles is as over-engineered and oddly fascinating as the snack itself.

It’s a reminder that some of the most enduring brands aren’t built with post-it notes and whiteboards—they’re built in laboratories, courtroom settlements, marketing misfires, and the occasional happy accident. And in the case of Pringles, all those quirks added up to a can that’s instantly recognizable around the world, proving that sometimes, the weirdest stories make the strongest brands.

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What The Duck! Is A New Paid Newsletter From BrandingBullshit.com

If you’ve enjoyed my free Branding Bullshit newsletter, don’t worry—you’ll still get all the general articles for free.

But…

If you upgrade your subscription,* you’ll get access to What The Duck!

What The Duck! will feature behind-the-scenes history, quirky anecdotes, and the surprising randomness behind some of the world’s most memorable brand identities and campaigns.

What You’ll Get

• Behind-the-scenes brand history you won’t find in textbooks

• Quirky anecdotes that show why randomness can make a brand iconic

• “Meaningless distinctiveness” in action

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If you upgrade to get access to What The Duck!, I may even invite you into my “brand tribe” and refer to you as my “ducklings.” Or maybe that’s too infantilizing? You tell me.

Have you ever wondered:

• Where did MailChimp get its name?

• How Aflac adopted a duck to represent their insurance brand?

• Why Toblerone is shaped like that?

Or maybe you’re wondering “why the duck” is this newsletter called What The Duck!?

Years ago, and I had a short-lived video blog/podcast. We wanted to showcase the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute’s idea of “meaningless distinctiveness” in action. So we picked a duck at random—and Stef worked his AI magic to bring it to life, even composing an intro song based on the duck’s image!

The execution was… questionable.

But the point was clear: people remember what feels unexpected and a little absurd.

What Is “The Duck?”

The duck is shorthand for that random asset, name, or campaign that appears completely out of place within its category. It can even refer to actual ducks—the Aflac Duck and Duck Tape (the brand name, not duct tape) are silly ideas with staying power.

Brands like Domino’s, Apple, and Wendy’s are also memorable precisely because of a bit of illogical human ingenuity. A pizza chain named after dominos, apples with nothing to do with tech, and a redhead named Wendy weren’t carefully calculated names. They were quickly generated ideas—and sometimes personally meaningful—but that’s what makes them iconic.

They had no place in their categories. You would never guess the product just by looking at their distinctive brand assets or hearing their name. As a result, they burrowed into our brains more efficiently—and ensured they couldn’t be copied.

Strange but True Origins

Despite the absence of strategy in their conception, there are still fascinating stories behind these brands:

• Domino’s was originally Dominick’s

• Wendy was named after Dave Thomas’ granddaughter

• Apple’s name conception was far less mythic than folklore would have you believe

• The Mercedes-Benz logo was sentimental

• The Energizer Bunny was the Duracell Bunny before Energizer stole it

We’ll also revisit iconic mental cues that were abandoned for absurd reasons—proof that even the best mental hooks can be lost to overthinking or boredom.

Much like the recent Cracker Barrel and Jaguar redesigns, there were “strategic” reasons for abandoning the following iconic assets as well:

• “Cool Spot” from 7-Up

• “Snap, Crackle, & Pop”

• The Tootsie Pop Owl (spoiler: he’s bAAaack, and they didn’t change a thing)

• That corn-looking logo for Easter Seals

• SurveyMonkey’s name (for those couple of months)

• “Captain Obvious” from Hotels.com

This is your insider pass to the stories behind the brands everyone thinks they know.

What The Duck! Is For Everyone

My hope is that people outside the branding industry will enjoy What The Duck!—who doesn’t love a bit of trivia? But, in a special way, it’s for creatives, business owners, and marketers.

• Creatives and business owners need inspiration to let their hair down and stop overthinking every design and naming decision.

• Marketers and creatives who love standing out need ammo to convince clients to take a walk on their wild side—and actually impact the bottom line.

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This Is Not Another “Logo History” Publication

Most newsletters and books stop at logos.

What The Duck! goes further—uncovering the origins of mascots, names, jingles, campaigns, package shapes, and more. Instead of rehashing obligatory, boring origin stories, we’ll zero in on the wonderfully weird brands that transformed oddball names, quirky mascots, and offbeat ideas into assets so sticky you can’t forget them.

Upgrade today* to get access to this new paid newsletter. You can cancel anytime—though fair warning: you may never look at brand identities the same way again.

Upgrade subscription

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Generative AI Is A Tool, That’s It

AI will be a gift to people with ideas.

It will take the half-baked sketches, clunky drafts, and impossible-to-visualize concepts living in a creative person’s head and turn them into something polished. It will be the world’s fastest intern, able to generate mockups, explore variations, and test executions in seconds. For designers and brand builders, that’s a huge advantage.

Generative AI is Adobe Illustrator on steroids—but it doesn’t think, dream, or notice when something is truly memorable.

Designers have been here before. Every new tool—from computer fonts in the 1980s to Photoshop to Canva—was greeted with skepticism. Each was supposed to ruin the craft. Each lowered the barrier to entry. And yet, none of them erased the need for vision.

Business owners sometimes slapped Papyrus onto a sign for their Hookah bar or chiropractic office, “like a thoughtless child wandering by a garden, yanking leaves along the way.”* But most understood that wouldn’t cut it. They still knew they needed a vision—or at least some human judgment—to design a strong brand.

AI, however, is different. Many (perhaps even most) small business owners and startups won’t just see it as another tool; they’ll see it as a one-stop branding shop. Unlike Illustrator, Photoshop, or Canva—which even sloppy business owners never mistook for a full creative process—AI presents itself as the whole package: naming, logos, taglines, even full visual identities.

And that’s exactly why it’s more dangerous.

Designers understand that a tool without vision produces garbage. Business owners, however, will put far more trust into AI, assuming the tool can provide the vision itself. This is the same mistake many already make with logo generators. Logo generators are just templates disguised as customization: hundreds of variations built off the same conventions. Buyers are tricked into believing they own something unique, when really they’re choosing from a deck of sameness. AI will create the same illusion at a higher level—branding that feels catered but is fundamentally conventional.

Worse, AI will also appear strategic.

Generative AI will excel in “brand strategy theater”—the endless ritual of workshops, archetypes, color psychology, and mind maps that mimics strategy while ignoring what actually makes a brand stick. Just like designers masquerading as “brand strategists” today, AI will go through the motions of rigor while skipping what matters: distinctiveness and timelessness.

But it can’t “create a duck.”

*Still the best SNL skit of all time.

For those that don’t know, there’s also a Part 2 now.

The Power of a Duck

In 1999, American Assurance Company was just another faceless insurance company with a name nobody could remember. Even after shortening their name to Aflac, brand awareness was stuck at 10%. Even the ad agency pitching the campaign kept forgetting the name. One day, someone muttered it over and over across the office—“Aflac… Aflac…”—just to jog a colleague’s memory. The colleague laughed and said, “You sound like a duck.”1

That throwaway joke became the entire pitch: a duck that obnoxiously quacks “Aflac!” while people fumble to recall the name of their insurance provider. It was weird. Pointless. Even annoying. And it worked.

After the Aflac Duck debuted on New Year’s Eve 1999, U.S. sales jumped 29% within the first year. By year three, they had doubled. Name recognition soared from 10% to 67% in two years. Today, it’s over 90%.

The duck wasn’t symbolic. It wasn’t “on brand.” You could even argue it was off-strategy for a serious health insurance brand to adopt a duck. But it was unforgettable.

AI is not currently designed for that, and it may never be.

Why AI Struggles With Distinctiveness

Generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Midjourney, or DALL·E don’t think or create. When tasked with a vision, they predict. They replicate patterns that already exist in the world.

That makes them very good at mimicking design trends, synthesizing category conventions, and producing polished, plausible outputs. In short, AI gives you what feels familiar. But true distinctiveness isn’t familiar. It breaks patterns. It violates expectations. That’s what makes it memorable.

Ask AI for a “playful but elegant” brand targeting “millennial women” and you’ll likely get back pastel “boho minimalism” paired with a two-word alliterative name and an ampersand in the middle—something like “Bushel&Basket” or “Seed&Sparrow.” Lovely. Predictable. Forgettable.

Humans, by contrast, don’t just execute; they notice when sameness is creeping in. We sense when something boring could become brilliant with the right twist. That’s how you get a duck that quacks, a gecko with a British accent, or a grocery store clerk selling car insurance. AI can create a gecko or a grocery store clerk, but it wouldn’t think to use either to sell insurance.

Generative AI has no taste, no gut, no cultural spidey sense. It doesn’t know when something is brilliant, only when it’s probable. That’s why it’s such a powerful tool in creative hands, and such a weak crutch in uncreative ones.

For small business owners, AI will look sturdy at first, but the moment they lean on it to grow their brands, it will snap in half. By the time the brand fades into the background, the damage will already be done.

Why Category-Defiant Distinctiveness Matters More Than Ever

AI will make branding faster, cheaper, and more refined than ever. Today, many business owners still choose Papyrus for their chiropractic offices. But Canva has made it easier than ever to create something beautiful and fashionable—even if it’s still generic.

AI will take this further: it won’t just generate safe, generic brands; it will generate safe, generic brands that look sleek and professional. Logos will feel trendy but blend together, taglines will sound committee-written, and names will blur into a sea of sameness. Business owners will trust the tool even more, mistaking surface-level polish for truly memorable design.

This is where Category-Defiant Distinctiveness (CDD) becomes essential. CDD is the creative strategy of deliberately using illogical, unexpected, or absurd brand assets to defy established category conventions. The goal is to break the pattern of sameness and achieve maximum mental availability.

Already one of the most potent advantages a brand can wield, CDD—like the Aflac Duck—will become even more crucial in a world overrun with competent-but-forgettable brands. When every AI-powered brand looks polished yet interchangeable, the ones that embrace something illogical, funny, or even absurd will be the brands people actually remember.

The Aflac Duck wasn’t “on strategy.” It was a random idea. A connection only a human would make.

AI can follow every rule flawlessly, but it can’t break them. Humans can. And that’s why distinctiveness is the last thing standing between a brand that fades and one that endures.

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My Awakening: From Branding Dogma to Evidence-Based Design

For years, I was a devout follower of every branding gospel: color psychology, "differentiate or die," brand purpose, mission and vision statements, brand personality, brand attributes, customer personas, hyper-targeting, "brand love," tribes, neuromarketing, Implicit Association Testing—you name it, I believed it.

My journey into design began far more simply. As a kid, I filled sketchbooks with logos for imaginary movie studios and skateboard brands, despite never owning a skateboard. Design wasn't a career; it was a creative escape. I initially pursued a film degree, leading me to a role as Media Director at a Catholic nonprofit, handling video production from start to finish.

My dormant interest in design reignited when I proposed a cost-saving idea: I could learn design in-house, saving the organization tens of thousands on outsourcing. They agreed. That’s when I discovered The Futur, a design education platform that, unlike others, didn't feel stuck in the past. I immersed myself in their courses, and within a year, I was designing everything.

My first real branding project arrived: a new online tool, unburdened by legacy, offering a chance for truly meaningful work. I loved every moment, yet self-doubt crept in. I returned to The Futur, devouring every branding course they offered. That’s where the "brand strategy"* bug truly bit me.

Months later, I left my job to launch my own design business. I cobbled together an 8-hour "brand strategy workshop" based on The Futur’s content—just enough to land my first major client. I wasn't an expert, but I could convincingly fake it. And it worked. The client adored the brand I created; we even became friends. Back then, I'd have confidently declared I'd "set them up with their ideal customer." If the clients had kept coming, I might never have questioned it. But they didn’t. When business slowed, so did my conviction.

*It's now clear to me that The Futur's brand strategy courses are not actual brand strategy, but rather a form of “brand strategy theater.”

My Wake-Up Call: Rewiring My Brain

During Lent1 2020, I took a break from social media. What began as 40 days stretched into three years. Without the daily cacophony of branding influencers, I finally found the mental space to truly explore.

That’s when I stumbled upon Daryl Weber’s Brand Seduction at my local library. Weber’s questioning of whether a brand could truly be distilled into neat lists of attributes or a “brand onion” resonated deeply. It opened the door to science-based branding. From Weber, I moved to Robert Heath’s Seducing the Subconscious, then Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. The pivotal moment arrived with a brief YouTube book review by Stef Hamerlinck2 of the Let's Talk Branding podcast. He introduced me to Byron Sharp’s How Brands Grow and Jenni Romaniuk’s Building Distinctive Brand Assets—books that completely rewired my understanding of branding.

Suddenly, everything clicked. Behavioral economics, advertising psychology, marketing effectiveness—they fit together like pieces of a puzzle. More importantly, they mirrored my own actual buying habits, once I honestly admitted them to myself.

The Cognitive Biases Fueling Branding Bullshit

This isn’t just my story. It’s a common cycle many designers experience. Branding myths are alluring; they offer shortcuts, a sense of identity, and a ready-made business model. I was fortunate enough to have the time and space to question everything. Most designers don't, which is one reason why these myths persist.

Many designers feel intense pressure: platforms like Fiverr and 99Designs, logo contests, and AI all threaten to commodify their work. It’s hard to convince clients that design is more than decoration. For many, “brand strategy” becomes the escape hatch—an opportunity to rebrand themselves as something more essential.

Online courses promise a fast track to legitimacy. They offer frameworks, buzzwords, and client-ready language that makes strategy feel accessible. Armed with this new vocabulary, designers begin layering in pop psychology—color theory, brand archetypes, Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle—anything that sounds impressive and can be sold as strategic thinking.

These ideas feel true, not because they’re supported by evidence, but because they exploit how our minds are wired. The result is a self-reinforcing system: one that flatters, confirms, and rewards belief over skepticism.

Here are some of the most common biases keeping it in place:

The Halo Effect

Assuming expertise in one area applies to another.

Because The Futur's technical design resources were excellent, I uncritically trusted their brand strategy views. It’s easy to assume expertise in one domain extends across all.

This dynamic is everywhere now. Some designers build credibility through real creative skill, then pivot into brand strategy. Others were never strong designers to begin with, but managed to launch successful agencies—often buoyed by luck, word of mouth, or raw sales ability. Now they sell courses on how to build an agency yourself, despite having no real experience beyond their own isolated success. In both cases, the halo effect leads designers to mistake charisma and popularity for expertise. As a result, branding bullshit often passes as credible advice—not because it’s grounded in evidence or tested insight, but because it’s delivered by someone who excelled in a different domain.

Questionable Cause Fallacy

Mistaking correlation for causation.

Consider color psychology: We're told blue conveys trust, and indeed, many banks are blue. But blue banks didn't succeed because they were blue. Their success stemmed from a myriad other factors: scale, service, pricing. Plenty of successful banks aren't blue—Wells Fargo (red/gold), HSBC (red/white), Ally (purple)—and they face no trust issues.

The same applies to fast food: Red is supposedly appetite-stimulating, yet Subway (green/yellow) and Taco Bell (purple) are household names. Culver's, with its unwavering blue and white, has radically distinguished itself as one of the fastest-growing chains. Color isn’t a magic growth key; it’s simply a design choice. It works when it’s distinctive, not when it adheres to clichés.

Brand archetypes also fall prey to this fallacy. Just because successful brands can be retrofitted with archetypes doesn’t mean those archetypes caused their success. Nike isn’t winning because it channels "The Hero"—athletes are inherently heroic; that’s the category, not the brand. Any athletic brand selling to athletes could be perceived as "heroic." "The Hero" isn't a unique driver of success. Harley-Davidson isn't "The Rebel"—motorcycle culture itself is rebellious. The brand simply reflects the category’s identity. If archetypes were truly salient, all market leaders would adopt them. Yet, many of the world’s biggest brands—Samsung, Toyota, Colgate—don’t align with any clear archetype. Most brands credited with an archetype never even discussed the idea internally. Archetypes aren't strategic drivers; they’re retroactive labels applied to successful brands. That's storytelling, not causation.

Simon Sinek’s Start With Why champions the idea that brands flourish by leading with a higher purpose. Designers incorporate his "Golden Circles" to identify "ideal customers." This approach creates brands that quickly become obsolete by chasing trends or generational stereotypes. The fundamental issue is that Sinek’s ideas are flawed. We project purpose onto successful brands because they are big. Once successful, their story becomes mythologized. We reverse-engineer a "why" where none existed. As rightly points out, Sinek’s own examples didn’t even “start with why.” Sinek’s theory doesn’t explain success; it romanticizes it.

Anchoring

Clinging to first ideas or sources encountered.

Most designers first learn from the same influencers pushing consumer “identification” with brands: Chris Do, Marty Neumeier, Seth Godin. These voices are popular and compelling, making them incredibly difficult to question. Meanwhile, less flashy but more evidence-based thinkers like Byron Sharp, Daniel Kahneman, and Robert Heath remain relatively unknown in design circles, despite their far greater contributions.

Confirmation Bias

Seeing only what supports your current beliefs.

We actively seek out and interpret information that confirms our existing beliefs, while ignoring contradictory evidence. Branding influencers cherry-pick success stories—often their own—while conveniently overlooking counterexamples. They hold up Apple to "prove" "differentiate or die," but ignore Samsung, which dominates without a clear brand personality. They celebrate Patagonia’s famous brand purpose, dismissing Columbia’s greater success without one. Designers do the same, admiring brands they like while ignoring those they habitually buy. Few "identify with" Kraft, Toyota, or Bic, yet these are undeniable market leaders.

Survivorship Bias

Focusing on winners, ignoring the failed majority.

For every successful “challenger brand” or “disruptor,” innumerable others attempted the exact same approach and faltered. Millions of businesses launch annually; half fail within five years. Most likely adopted the same branding myths. Success stories don’t prove the theory; they are the exceptions. We cannot look to the outliers as the norm for growth.

Bandwagon Effect

Believing something because others do.

Challenging branding orthodoxy can feel incredibly isolating. I often find myself clashing with fellow designers deeply invested in these myths. It’s difficult to find community when you’re poking holes in their livelihoods. And clients buy into these myths too. When your perspective contradicts the gurus they trust, it's harder for them to trust you.

I’ve literally been told, after critiquing Seth Godin, that he “can’t be wrong if he’s that popular.” Ironically, among experienced marketers and researchers, almost no one buys what Seth Godin is selling.

This is where the bandwagon effect can bleed into groupthink. Bandwagon behavior is about following popular ideas to fit in. Groupthink goes further: it happens when you’re surrounded only by people who share the same ideas—so you stop realizing those ideas are even up for debate. If you don’t know people outside your circle, you don’t realize that what feels like common sense inside the group is often dismissed—or even laughed at—by people outside it. There’s a reason Fortune 500 companies rarely hire the Seth Godin’s, Chris Do’s, and Gary Vee’s of the world to work on significant projects.

Sunk Cost Fallacy

Sticking with bad ideas due to past investment.

We stubbornly adhere to bad ideas simply because we’ve already invested significant time, effort, or money into them. Many designers have built entire careers on branding myths. Some now educate other designers on these very same flawed ideas. Once you’ve built an audience or business around a belief, changing course isn’t just hard—it’s financially costly. The incentives reward staying the course, not questioning it.

Design for Memory, Not Meaning

Branding bullshit endures because it flatters the intellect. It gives designers a sandbox of strategy-speak and aesthetic perfectionism to play in. But in the pursuit of the “perfect” identity, they often forget the one thing that actually matters: being remembered.

Not consciously admired. Subconsciously remembered.

The truth is, great branding isn’t born from overthinking or theory. It’s not the result of mapping ten archetypes to a mood board or crafting a 60-page brand guide no one reads. It’s built on something far simpler—and far more powerful: radical distinctiveness and timelessness. Instantly recognizable, unmistakably yours, impossible to ignore.

That’s what cuts through. That’s what sticks.

Breaking free from the noise isn’t easy. It means resisting the pressure to intellectualize everything. It means letting go of the idea that branding is about crafting meaning, and instead realizing it’s about imprinting memory.

But once you do, you start to see it clearly: branding isn’t a strategy workshop. It’s a handful of visual and verbal cues, repeated until they burn themselves into people’s minds. Simple. Distinct. Timeless. Not a tangle of buzzwords wrapped in shiny packaging—but something built to last.

Want to chat about your advertising? Schedule a free intro call.

Agencies Win. Clients lose.

Cannes Lion season is here—where applause matters more than effectiveness, and branding is optional. Where agencies win awards to win new clients, to chase more awards. It’s a system built to impress juries, not grow brands. And it’s shaped how marketers think about what makes advertising work.

For the past two decades, marketers have treated emotional storytelling as the holy grail of advertising. “Make people feel something,” they say. “Or they won’t remember you.” That belief has shaped a generation of campaigns—beautifully shot, cleverly written, widely admired. But admiration isn’t effectiveness.

People don’t often buy because they feel.
They buy because they notice. And remember.

Let’s talk about how that actually happens.

Design is King. Not Emotion.

Robert Heath—one of advertising’s most overlooked researchers—argued that ads are often more effective when processed passively, not actively.

He draws a key distinction:

• Active attention is focused, deliberate, effortful.

• Passive attention is low-level, automatic—while scrolling, waiting in line, or half-watching TV.

Most ads are encountered passively.

We’re not sitting down to engage. We’re glancing, skimming, zoning out. The most engaged we get is hovering over the “Skip Ad” button.

Advertisers know this. They know attention is rare—so they chase it. Loud visuals. Tear-jerking stories. Shock. Purpose. Twist endings. But in trying to earn attention, they often forget to brand. The logo comes late, if at all. Brand codes are hidden. Consistency is sacrificed for surprise.

They reverse the order. But it should be:
Brand first. Then get noticed.

Because even when attention fails, branding can still work.
But when branding fails, attention is wasted.

Take Volkswagen’s “The Force.”
Adored. Applauded. Awarded.
But many didn’t recall it was for VW.

That’s not an outlier. That’s the Cannes playbook. Emotions take center stage. Branding takes a back seat.

But when distinctive brand assets—colors, logos, characters, jingles—are on screen from start to finish, something different happens. They stick. Quietly, automatically.
Later—at the shelf, in a scroll, in a snap decision—those cues resurface as familiarity.

And familiarity drives choice.

Why Cannes Lions Don’t Hunt.

Cannes celebrates ads that feel like short films: emotional, cinematic, purpose-driven, often politically aligned with the jury.

That’s why brands like Geico never win Lions—despite being some of the most distinctive, consistent, and effective advertisers of the last 20 years.

Cannes rewards work that wins attention—but not necessarily effectiveness.

Most Cannes winners barely ran in the real world.
Many hide any recognizable branding.
Few built memory.

Cannes doesn’t reward growth.
It rewards taste. And virtue signaling.

Creativity Is Not Enough.

Creativity can supercharge a campaign—but only when built on brand fundamentals.

The IPA’s The Long and the Short of It found that creatively awarded campaigns are more effective only when they are:

• Well branded

• Widely distributed

• Consistently run over time

Creativity is a multiplier. Not a substitute.
When campaigns bury logos, ditch fluent devices, or reinvent brand codes—it kills effectiveness.

That’s why “boring” sometimes works better. Not because boring is good—but because boring, well-branded ads often outperform emotional ones that made the wrong tradeoff. Personal injury lawyers in the U.S. have mastered this: terrible ads, unforgettable branding.

Most Ads Won’t Win Awards. But They Can Win Memory.

Brand growth isn’t driven by emotional depth.
It’s driven by mental availability.

And mental availability comes from distinctive design, repeated exposure, and showing up consistently.

Most Cannes winners make a tradeoff: emotion over branding.

That’s why Cannes Lions roar.
But they rarely bring home meat.

Want to chat about your brand? Schedule a free intro call.

I live in Milwaukee, WI—where David Gruber is the undisputed king of advertising.

Gruber saturates the market. And not just the personal injury lawyer space—every category. If you drive through Milwaukee, odds are you’ll see him 10 times before you see your exit.

But Gruber hasn’t come out of nowhere like the new kid in town with a beard—Russell Nicolet—did a couple years ago…

Gruber’s been at it since the late 1990s.

Gruber’s awkward presence hits you like a ton of bricks.

For Breaking Bad fans, he’s Wisconsin’s Saul Goodman. A caricature. A trope. Every metro area in the U.S. has four or five firms just like his. He’s the textbook personal injury lawyer: overexposed and cloying.

And yet…it works.

There’s no question Gruber’s ads are effective. Measuring ad performance is notoriously messy, and most “proprietary models” are just expensive guesswork. But Gruber simplifies the equation: either his campaigns are wildly successful, or he’s been throwing millions into the void for over 25 years. And he’s still standing.

What’s fascinating is that his ads break every rule we’re told to follow. They lack emotional appeal, entertainment value, or any clear differentiators. They are the antithesis of a Cannes “Grand Prix” winner. Advertisers write them off as amateurish.

But they work. So, what can we learn?

How Can Brands Cut Through, Even With Boring Advertising?

1. Be distinctive.

Gruber’s latest out-of-home campaigns feature a jarring neon yellow border against a deep navy backdrop—a bold departure from the forgettable blue-and-silver palette of years past. It grabs your attention, even if you don’t want it to.

But even before the color change, Gruber’s billboards always featured the same recognizable elements: his face, and the now-iconic tagline, “One Call, That’s All.”*

If your brand isn’t unmistakable, you're not just climbing uphill—you’re running in place and throwing away ad dollars. Confused customers don’t buy; they move on. Distinctiveness isn’t optional; it’s your sharpest edge in a crowded market.

So drop the temptation to be clever or emotionally resonant at the expense of recognition. Entertainment fades. Clever lines get lost. But a brand that fully owns its identity—even if that includes a clunky tagline or a quirky founder with a bad haircut—sticks.

*Fun Fact: Gruber doesn’t own the phrase, “One Call, That’s All.” Five other personal injury lawyers across the country legally share it—and most of them are friends. They’ve even taken trips to Vegas together. A fraternity of legal marketers, united by a four-word slogan and a shared belief in relentless brand saturation. Until one of them decides to expand their territory…

2. They are clear.

Gruber Law’s ads are clear about the category. Clear about what they do. And crucially, clear about who’s advertising. No wasted space. No message crammed in. The message is ridiculously simple: Injured? Gruber Law exists as an option.

As advertisers, we tend to celebrate the opposite—billboards that hide the logo, entertain, or get a little PR on LinkedIn. But Gruber’s dominance in Milwaukee suggests that clarity, saturation, and consistency beat creativity.

If people don’t know what you do or who you are, they can’t choose you. It’s that simple. Clarity comes first. Creativity comes second. Especially on billboards, where there’s limited room for both. David Gruber gets this. He doesn’t even attempt creativity.

3. They are consistent.

Gruber’s been flooding airwaves and highways for almost three decades. And aside from the recent color tweak, almost nothing has changed. Still, no media training for the face of the brand. No pivot to storytelling. No award-winning creative agencies have been contacted.

Gruber just shows up—awkward delivery, stiff posture, and all.

Clarity Saves Ad Dollars.

Some argue that Gruber’s blunt, to-the-point billboards are a luxury—affordable only for brands with the budget to plaster a city with ads. They argue small brands have to earn fame through emotional storytelling or radical creativity—or risk fading into the noise.

But that logic assumes people are actually paying attention.

They’re not.

The average driver isn’t processing your brand essence or detecting your differentiator. They’re glancing—half-aware, speeding by. In that fleeting half-second, clarity isn’t optional. It’s all you get.

So yes—make the logo bigger. Limit yourself to 25 characters. Blow up the font size. Say what you do. Show the product. Build a distinctive identity.

Be unmistakably you first. Then, if there’s space left, entertain. Tug a heartstring. Demonstrate your difference.

Gruber gets it. His ads are crystal clear, and his brand is impossible to confuse with the competition. You don’t need to guess the category. You don’t need to wonder what he wants. You see his face, you clock the color scheme, and you hear Gruber’s cadence in your head: “One call…That’s all.”

No mystery. No nuance. Just brute-force brand recognition.

Gruber’s ads obey the most brutal truth in advertising:

If they don’t know it’s you, it doesn’t matter what you said.

For more thoughts on brand design, advertising, and marketing, you can find me on LinkedIn.

Want to chat about your brand? Schedule a free intro call.

Want to chat about your brand? Schedule a free intro call.

I wrote a piece for How Brands Are Built on the moral theater of “brand love,” the spiritual language marketers borrow to justify it, and why it’s exploitative and dishonest (even if unintentionally).

Here’s an excerpt:

What is “Meaningless Distinctiveness?”

Before we get into examples, let’s talk about meaningless distinctiveness—because it’s often misunderstood.

When the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute talks about meaningless distinctiveness, they are referring to distinctive brand assets—logos, colors, mascots, jingles—and names* that stand out precisely because they seem randomly chosen or disconnected from the category.

The goal is to build brands so distinctive no competitor can—or would even think to—copy them. Imitation isn’t always deliberate. Assets that feel unnatural or irrelevant to the category are less likely to be mimicked, even by accident.

*Ehrenberg-Bass doesn’t specifically include names in its discussion of “meaningless distinctiveness,” but the same logic applies.

The issue is that both “meaningless” and “distinctiveness” get twisted (even Jenni Romaniuk of the Institute believes the term “meaningless” falls short).

Meaningless doesn’t mean “no meaning”—it means “no category meaning,” and often no business meaning at all.

Everything has meaning. “Meaningless” here just means no meaning in a market context. For example, apples have no obvious link to tech—even if plenty of people, including Apple themselves, have tried to connect the two after the fact.*

*There are plenty of myths about Apple’s name and logo, but they are all post-rationalization. According to Steve Jobs’ biography, he chose it after visiting an apple orchard while on a fruitarian kick. He liked that it was “fun, spirited, and not intimidating.” That’s it. Apple only made the knowledge connection after picking the name, with their first Isaac Newton logo. Less than a year later, they scrapped it—and never went back to that idea.

Additionally, designers often claim “the logo’s simplicity reflects the product’s simplicity.” In reality, it’s simple because they hired a designer who understood that simple logos work. That’s true across the board—iconic logos tend to be simple, and most logos get simplified over time.

Distinctiveness isn’t differentiation, and it’s not at odds with it.*

Distinctiveness is about unmistakable brand assets—like the Geico Gecko, Lacoste’s crocodile, Wendy’s name/square patties.

Differentiation is about perceived differences (features, benefits, positioning, personality, pricing, etc.)—like Geico’s playfulness, Lacoste’s polo association, Wendy’s “fresh never frozen” line.

While both can contribute significantly to brand growth, distinctiveness has one particular advantage over differentiation. It is legally ownable. Geico owns its gecko, Lacoste its crocodile, and Wendy’s its name. By contrast, Geico’s playfulness used to stand out—now every insurer tries it. Lacoste invented the polo shirt—but today, they’re one of many brands making them. Wendy’s tagline was stolen from KFC.†

Other factors—timing, scale, distribution—matter more than meaningless distinctiveness, and differentiation can drive growth. But brands with some level of meaningless distinctiveness dominate Interbrand’s Top 100 for a reason. It’s durable, memorable, and hard to copy.

Now to the examples.

*Some frame distinctiveness and differentiation as either/or, but meaningless distinctiveness can reinforce any differentiation strategy. Even the “brand love” crowd can’t deny that many of their favorites—Starbucks, Apple, Suburu—lean on meaningless distinctiveness.

†It’s significant that Wendy’s blatantly stole their tagline from KFC because burger chains don’t just compete with other burger chains—they compete with chicken, pizza, and coffee shops too.

Famous Examples of Meaningless Distinctiveness:

1. The Lacoste Crocodile:

In 1923, Lacoste’s tennis star founder René Lacoste bet his coach he could win a crocodile skin suitcase after a Davis Cup match in Boston. Later, a journalist referred to him as “the crocodile.” The symbol stuck.

2. The Coca-Cola Polar Bears:

The Coca-Cola Polar Bears were first used in a 1922 French poster of a polar bear giving the sun a cold Coca-Cola. This was likely a strategic choice to emphasize Coke as a cold drink on a hot day. However, throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s, the polar bears shed their original message and took on the meaning of Christmas. The exact opposite of a hot day. Since their transition into a Christmas symbol, there is no link between the iconic polar bears and its category.

3. Coca-Cola’s Bottle Shape:

Speaking of Coca-Cola, they have always been at the forefront of distinctiveness for distinctiveness sake. In 1915, they asked bottle manufacturer, The Root Glass Company, to design something “so distinct that you would recognize it by feel in the dark or lying broken on the ground”.

Now that’s a proper design brief in my opinion.

4. The Geico Gecko:

GEICO stands for Government Employees’ Insurance Company. In 1999, the creative team at Martin Agency was hired to create a “mental shortcut” for the brand.

According to Per Neel Williams, SVP and group creative director at Martin, the Geico Gecko wasn’t intended to endure as a distinctive brand asset long-term. It was an idea for a single campaign.

“It was just, ‘Oh, Gecko sounds like Geico.’ The original concept was about the Gecko being annoyed because people kept calling him thinking he was Geico and they were trying to get car insurance.”

Since then, Martin Agency has spent 30 years helping Geico reinforce the gecko. Originally created for car insurance, the mascot’s meaninglessness makes it easy to stretch across products—car, motorcycle, home, even pet insurance.

5. The Guinness Harp:

The harp has been a symbol of Ireland since the 13th century. In 1862, Guinness based their logo on a specific 14th century harp called the “Brian Boru Harp” to honor their Irish heritage.

Ironically, the Guinness harp, a symbol steeped in Irish history, now adorns Guinness Blonde American Lager, a testament to the adaptability of brand assets that have become meaningless for most over time.

6. The MGM Lion:

A publicist for Metro Goldwyn Mayer, Howard Dietz, chose the MGM lion as a nod to his alma mater, Columbia University. 6 lions have served as the mascot since 1916.

7. “Jake from State Farm” and the State Farm Sonic Logo:

The original “Jake From State Farm” was a real employee of the company, Jake Stone. Like the GEICO gecko, “Jake From State Farm” was meant to be a one-off character until State Farm hired an actor, Kevin Miles, to transition “Jake” into a distinctive brand asset.

“Jake from State Farm” is not their only distinctive brand asset aside from their logo.

In a stroke of genius, State Farm’s cliché jingle of the 1980s (“Like a Good Neighbor State Farm Is There”) has evolved into a campaign in the 2000s featuring customers singing the jingle’s lyrics before an agent magically appears. Today, the jingle is now a timeless sonic logo, paired with Kevin Miles speaking the lyrics.

8. Colonel Sanders:

Harland Sanders had a tumultuous career marked by numerous brawls, a literal shootout with a competitor, business ventures, and several shifts in employment. Despite his roller coaster of tensions with others, in 1935, he was commissioned as a Kentucky Colonel, a title awarded for his local popularity. After bouncing through various failed ventures, he eventually found success franchising his fried chicken recipe, founding KFC, which grew into a global brand.

“Colonel Sanders” understood showmanship, distinctiveness, and consistency. He began leaning into his title of colonel in 1950 and began dressing as a “southern gentleman.” He wore the same outfit every day in public during the last 20 years of his life. He even dyed his mustache and goatee to match his hair.

Since his death in 1980, KFC has turned the real-life Colonel into a rotating brand mascot. His image has been repackaged as everything from a cartoon to a marketing gimmick, played by a revolving cast of celebrities—Jim Gaffigan, Ray Liotta, Jason Alexander, even Reba McEntire.

9. The Budweiser Clydesdales:

The original Budweiser Clydesdales came from Shea’s Brewery. August A. Busch Jr. bought them in 1933 after Shea’s had used them to promote their own beer.

Busch Jr. gave them to his father to mark the end of Prohibition. It started as a prank: Busch Jr. said he’d bought his father a car, then rolled up with a hitch of Clydesdales instead.

Hitched to a red, white, and gold wagon, they hauled the first case of post-Prohibition Budweiser through the streets of St. Louis. After that, the horses toured the country, delivering beer to President Roosevelt and Al Smith, the former New York governor who helped bring Prohibition down.

Today, the Budweiser Clydesdales show up at the Super Bowl as a distinctive asset that can actually carry emotion. Most brand assets can’t pull that off; they haven’t been around long enough or used consistently enough to earn it.

10. Dominos:

Domino’s Pizza experienced a fortuitous discovery when a delivery driver suggested the name “Domino's,” once the founder discovered the previous name, “Dominick’s,” had trademark issues.

11. Caterpillar:

The early steam tractors of the 1890s were heavy and their wheels would sink into the ground. One of the founders of Holt Manufacturing, Benjamin Holt, attempted to solve this problem by wrapping planks around the wheels. When company photographer Charles Clements commented that the machine looked like a caterpillar when viewed upside-down through his camera, Holt seized on the metaphor and the company was named.

Even though Caterpillar now goes by CAT—and most people will never need to buy construction equipment—the full name still lives in almost every American’s head.

12. Ronald McDonald

In 1963, years after “Bozo” vanished from TV, Willard Scott—who played Bozo—introduced “Ronald McDonald, the Happy Hamburger Clown” in local D.C. spots.

The ads worked. Two years later, circus performer Coco the Clown reworked the look for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and a spot during 1965’s equivalent of the Super Bowl.

Despite calls from childhood obesity groups to retire him, McDonald’s hasn’t budged. Hard to blame them. One survey found 96% of U.S. schoolchildren recognize Ronald.

13. The Duracell Bunny

You read that right. The Energizer Bunny started out as the Duracell Bunny.

From 1973 through the late ’80s, Duracell ran its “Drumming Bunny” (a different rendition of an elephant above) ads—then let the trademark lapse in 1988. Energizer swooped in with a parody, and the rest is branding history.*

*Just because Energizer swiped a distinctive brand asset doesn’t mean you can. Even when brands temporarily use a competitor’s assets to take shots, they usually end up boosting the other brand’s recall. Most people won’t catch the nuance. Best case, both brands—or the whole category—get a bump. Worst case, only the target does, especially if they’re much bigger. Energizer pulled it off because Duracell didn’t fight back, and Energizer had the advertising budget to keep the pink bunny front and center ever since.

Just five years after the last Duracell Bunny ad aired, Energizer gaslit the U.S. into forgetting Duracell ever had one. Their ads positioned the “Energizer Bunny” (a phrase they hammered) against a fake rival, SuperVolt—a thinly veiled stand-in for Duracell—that failed to launch a mascot.

Meanwhile, in the UK, Duracell never dropped the pink bunny…

In 1992, Duracell and Energizer split bunny rights: Energizer got the U.S., Duracell kept Europe. But in 2016, Energizer sued after spotting Duracell’s bunny on battery packs in U.S. stores—claiming Duracell was dodging the agreement by funneling in European stock. Duracell blamed rogue importers.

Lawyers have been tied up for thirty years over the rights to a pink bunny. That’s how valuable meaningless distinctiveness can be.

Also, can you imagine the Mandela Effect on people who have lived in the U.S. and Europe?

14. The Morton Salt Girl

What have you always seen in the image above? Just a girl in an umbrella?

Did you ever catch the most important detail? The salt pouring out behind her?

The Morton Salt girl was created to address a problem Morton uniquely solved: salt caking from humidity. In 1911, caking was a major issue until Morton added magnesium carbonate, an anti-caking agent. In 1914, when brainstorming for their first ad campaign, N.W. Ayer pitched several ideas, all of which were rejected. It was a backup idea that stuck—a girl in the rain with salt pouring out, paired with the slogan "When it rains, it pours." It emphasized that Morton Salt didn't cake, even in the rain.

Today, all salt brands add magnesium carbonate—another example showing that differentiation can't be "owned" for long. The girl no longer carries a message. She's become meaningless over time,* with most never noticing the salt pouring out.

*The same can be said for NBC’s Peacock which was first created to highlight NBC’s color TV. Once a visual representation of a differentiator, now just a bit of branding trivia.

15. Adidas (Name and Logos)

In 1924, Adolf and Rudolf Dassler opened a shoe shop: Gebrüder Dassler Schuhfabrik (“Dassler Brothers Shoe Factory”). They were the only company in the world making spiked shoes for athletes.

Despite being actual Nazi Party members (not what passes as a "Nazi" today), their business took off when Jesse Owens, a black track and field athlete, wore their shoes at the 1936 Olympics. However, in 1949, the brothers had a falling out and launched separate companies.

Adolf started Adidas. Why “Adidas”? Simple. Adolf’s nickname was “Adi,” and his last name started with “Das.” That’s it. No strategy decks. No naming consultants.

Rudolf, his brother, started Ruda (combining “Ru” and “Da”).

Ruda didn’t stick, however. A few months later, the company was renamed Puma.

The Adidas logo has a similar history of “Adi” Dassler making decisions somewhat randomly.

The original logo (shown above within the brown shapw) was an illustration of a shoe with three stripes. Why three? Adolf tested different stripe counts and found three showed up best in photos.*

*If you’ve read my article Design Has A Brand Strategy Problem, you’ll remember Paul Rand used the same practical considerations for the IBM logo.

After dropping the shoe illustration, Adidas used a plain wordmark until 1972, when they expanded into clothing. That’s when the “trefoil” logo was introduced. It was floral-inspired while maintaining the same 3 lines from before.

In 1989, the “Equipment” logo was designed to reflect how the three stripes looked from inside an Adidas shoe.

So there it is. A nickname mashup, some basic visibility tests, and a dash of Nazi family drama; that’s the origin of Adidas’s meaningless name and logos.

16. Shell

Before Shell became a global energy giant, it was built on—yes—seashells.

In 1833, Marcus Samuel sold antiques, then moved into oriental shells, which were trending in interior design. Demand grew so much he began importing them from the Far East.

Samuel never entered the energy business himself—he died in 1870. But his sons expanded his import/export seashell business into oil, commissioning the first tanker to pass through the Suez Canal, which changed the industry.

Standard Oil, their main competitor, sold kerosene in distinctive blue cans. To stand out, the Samuel brothers used red cans and renamed their father’s company “Shell.”*

*I wasn’t able to track down examples of the original cans, but I’d love to see them.

17. McDonald’s Arches

The Golden Arches weren’t born from deep symbolism or clever strategy; they were born from a desire to stand out.

Richard McDonald sketched two simple half-circle arches because he thought they’d be distinctive and visible. Several architects rejected the idea (they didn’t like the idea of their client pitching architecture ideas) before the brothers hired Stanley Meston, who—along with his assistant Charles Fish—turned the crude sketch into a sleek, modern design.

Later, McDonald’s head of design noticed that when viewed at an angle, the structural arches vaguely resembled the letter “M.” That visual coincidence became the logo in 1962.

Marketers love to slap meaning onto brand assets that were really just designed to get noticed. The Golden Arches are a prime example.

When McDonald's considered removing them, marketing consultant Louis Cheskin argued they had to stay—not because they were distinctive and had already won hard-earned recognition, but because of his own research on their Freudian appeal. Cheskin compared them to "mother McDonald's breasts," suggesting their subconscious connection to breasts symbolized homemade food.

Designers love to apply psychology to McDonald’s, too. Despite zero evidence that color psychology influenced their choice of red and yellow, design influencers insist McDonald’s colors were picked to spark appetite or excitement.

It’s the same old story: marketers and designers make up complex psychological meanings for brand assets that were never meant to carry any.

18. KitKat

Mark Ritson uses KitKat to illustrate his concept of “relative differentiation”—the idea that brands can appear more differentiated from competitors, even if their differentiators aren’t truly unique. To make his point, he often highlights KitKat’s relentless marketing, positioning itself as the snack for “taking a break.”

I think there are far better examples Ritson could use to illustrate his point than KitKat.

Ritson is right that KitKat has attempted to differentiate themselves in this way. KitKat was originally created for workers at the Rowntree factory,. The bar was designed as a quick, convenient treat during breaks. The two-finger design, perfect for breaking in half, made it shareable and practical. Over time, the brand reinforced the "break" messaging in its advertising, tying KitKat to moments of rest.

But here’s the thing: I’m not convinced most consumers connect KitKat with “taking a break.” It’s more likely they think of it as “breaking chocolate apart.”

This is where the line between relative differentiation and meaningless distinctiveness can blur. KitKat’s breakable design is distinctive, but does it still carry the original “rest” meaning, or is it just a quirky, memorable feature with no real practical use?

I’d love to see some research on this. Although I’m not sure you could isolate the effect—ask people which brand reminds them of “taking a break” and they'll likely say KitKat, primed by the jingle and the physical act of snapping it apart, even if they’d never made the association before.

I’m also doubtful that saving part of your KitKat for later or sharing it is a real differentiator. Sure, some people might do it, but does it drive purchases? To me, KitKat is just another option for “tasty chocolate with a crispy texture,” like Twix or Crunch bars. The main differences? Ingredients and slight texture variations.

What stands out to me most is KitKat’s distinctiveness—its red packaging, unique shape, name, and that jingle.*

Then again, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe people do choose KitKat for “taking breaks” or sharing. All I know is the few friends I’ve asked about it have never made that connection.

*Speaking of which, they really need to bring the jingle back. Their current generic approach is far less sticky. I believe the iconic jingle does less to reinforce the “taking a break” idea and more to boost the chocolate’s distinctiveness—its texture, split design, and the act of breaking it apart. The jingle also reinforces the KitKat name far more than their current campaigns. It locks the brand name into the melody, making it instantly recognizable by sound alone—even The Office riffed on how stuck-in-your-head the KitKat name gets.

19: The Elmer’s Glue Bull

Got glue? Borden, a dairy company, did in 1951.

Why would a dairy company start making glue? Early glue used casein—the same protein found in milk. It wasn’t completely out of nowhere. Neither was Elmer the Bull.

Gail Borden had already reshaped the dairy industry in the 1800s by inventing the first commercial method for condensing milk. After his death, the New York Condensed Milk Company—later renamed Borden—pioneered glass bottles for liquid milk.

Then came the buying spree. Riding the success of their condensed milk, Borden bought 200 companies in three years. These days, at least in Wisconsin where I live, Borden’s mostly still known for its condensed milk. You can find their liquid milk in some U.S. stores, but in the 1940s, Borden was the name in milk.

Elsie the Cow debuted in 1936. Today, a cow mascot would disappear into the noise—cows are the default for dairy. But in the 1930s and ’40s, there weren’t many dairy mascots, so Elsie had the space to stand out. The yellow flowers around her neck helped, sure, but she worked because Borden pushed her hard. They turned her into a national campaign—billboards, magazines, parades—and even gave her a husband.

Elmer started as a background character in Borden’s milk ads—usually fixing things around the house. When Borden launched a chemical division, they saw what Elsie had done for their milk and reused the playbook. Elmer became the mascot. When they rolled out their glue, they named it after him.

Unlike Elsie, Elmer had no built-in relevance to its category. He only made sense because of his connection with Borden milk and marriage to Elsie. And that’s exactly why he worked.

If Borden milk and Elmer’s Glue launched today, Elsie would blend in. Elmer wouldn’t.

20. Liberty Mutual’s Limu Emu & Doug

So far, we’ve looked at “meaningless” brand assets that were born with meaning—then lost it over time.

Let’s end with one that started meaningless on purpose: Limu Emu & Doug.

The campaign came from Goodby Silverstein & Partners—the same agency behind “Got Milk?” According to Liberty Mutual’s CMO Jenna Lebel, the emu and his human sidekick were one of a dozen random ideas. “We were truly open to all types of spokescharacters during the exploration phase of campaign development.” Other ideas included a talking pigeon in yellow pants and a misunderstood T. rex trying to live a normal life. Limu Emu & Doug just happened to test better.

“Limu” is short for Liberty Mutual. “Emu” rhymed. “Doug” was picked from a name list. That’s about as far as the strategy went. Sure, there’s a loose concept—the two act like crime-fighting partners, and the crime is overpaying for car insurance—but the idea wasn’t born from some deep brand framework. It came from creative instinct.

Since their debut during COVID, Limu and Doug have spun off side characters, like the “Liberty Biberty” guy—played by a real-life soap star who first appeared in a spot where he botched Doug’s lines while auditioning to steal his role. Now he has his own campaign where he corrects a toddler who says “Liberty” correctly—by insisting, “No, it’s Biberty.” That campaign drops the “Liberty Biberty” guy into the same setup Liberty Mutual’s been using for over a decade—actors delivering flat, generic testimonies pretending to relate to what we’re going through, all set in front of the Statue of Liberty. It might not be the funniest ad, but it’s certainly an improvement.

The insurance industry’s been riding the randomness wave ever since Geico accidentally struck gold with the Gecko in the late ’90s. Since then: Flo, The General, the Aflac Duck. Even Geico couldn’t help themselves—they followed the Gecko with cavemen and a camel yelling “Hump Day.”

None of these mascots are tied to insurance—or to anything people typically associate with it: safety, preparedness, fear, accidents, service. And that’s exactly why they work.

Conclusion

Meaningless distinctiveness stands the test of time. These names and assets—whether logos, jingles, package shapes, or mascots—are disconnected from the category they represent, making them harder to imitate, even inadvertently.

Most were created with intent. But today, customers don’t notice or care. Whatever meaning they once had is long gone.

And that’s why they work.

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Growing up in the back seat of my mom’s minivan, running errands with my three siblings, a catchy song would often play on the radio. We all knew the lyrics by heart. But this song wasn’t by Elton John, Boys II Men, or Whitney Houston—the pop stars my mom loved in the '90s. It was written in 1982 by Linda Kaplan Thaler, with help from bestselling crime novelist James Patterson of all people.

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What If My Family Listened To Branding Bullsh*t?

In 1919, my great-grandfather, Charles August Franke, bought a hole-in-the-wall donut shop in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and called it Franke’s.

By 2020—101 years later—Franke’s had closed its doors for good.

Born and raised in New York, “C.A.” trained for WWI in Arkansas before heading off to fight. He fell in love with the state and promised himself that if he survived, he’d come back.

C.A. was the son of a spark plug manufacturer who immigrated from Germany, but he saw the writing on the wall—mass production was about to crush smaller, independent shops like his father’s. After the war, true to his word, he returned to Arkansas and bought that donut shop. No one knows why he picked a bakery of all things (he wasn’t a baker), but that tiny storefront grew into a bustling business, expanding to multiple retail outlets and even delivering bread around town

By 1924, riding the wave of his bakery’s success, C.A. pivoted to a new trend sweeping the country: cafeterias. He opened Franke’s Cafeteria in downtown Little Rock, and it quickly became the go-to spot for shoppers heading to “the city.”

The bakery was eventually sold off, but the cafeteria thrived—passed down from C.A. to my grandfather Bill Sr. and C.A.’s son-in-law Dick Lewis, followed by my father Chris and his brother (also named Bill) who ran 3 locations. In 2005, my dad sold his shares to my uncle.

Bill intended to pass the restaurant down to his daughter, Christen, continuing the Franke’s legacy into its fourth generation. But in 2016, Christen died unexpectedly, and less than a year later, Bill followed. The cafeteria was left to his wife, Carolyn, who kept the business running for three more years. But the toll of her grief, combined with the burden of managing the operation, became unbearable. She had no option but to sell in 2019.

Under new ownership, Franke’s shut down during the first year of COVID and never reopened—marking the end of a family legacy that had endured wars, depressions, and generations, only to be undone by loss and a pandemic.

When Branding Bullsh*t Meets Real Businesses

Branding bullshit didn’t kill Franke’s—but it could have.

I can’t stand the thought of a “brand strategist” swooping in to charge my grieving aunt—desperate to keep the restaurant alive—tens of thousands of dollars, only to tell her:

• “The script font in Franke’s logo might’ve been popular in the ’20s, but it needs a redesign to stay relevant for your ‘target audience.’”—as if 100 years of built-up brand recognition meant nothing.

• “Franke’s sounds outdated. Have you considered something more modern, like ‘Gather & Graze’ or ‘Urban Bites’ to appeal to a younger crowd?”—as if a century of name recognition is a problem to be solved.

• “People expect a modern customer journey. Let’s ditch the tray line and add mobile ordering or self-serve kiosks.”—gutting the cafeteria of its entire business model and the primary reasons many customers ate there—a bit of variety and nostalgia.

• And, inevitably: “What’s your brand archetype? Is Franke’s more ‘The Caregiver’ or ‘The Everyman’?”—as if a 100-year-old restaurant with a rich history could be defined by an oversimplified label.

Most brand designers work with smaller companies—companies that could survive or collapse, succeed or disappear, all based on the advice of a brand designer or strategist.

Our clients pour everything into their businesses. Some have built them over generations. Others scrape together a budget they don’t even have just to hire us, betting on us to help launch their company. Who are we to hold their futures hostage for weeks, months, or even years of strategy and design, only to send them into the market armed with recycled advice from branding books by self-appointed experts? Or worse: LinkedIn carousels?

Tropicana can botch a redesign and survive. SurveyMonkey can change their name, realize what a dumb move it was, and change it back—and remain a market leader.

A family-owned cafeteria with three locations, a local real estate agency, or a solo entrepreneur who sank their life savings into a dream doesn’t get that luxury.

In our industry, we laugh off bad branding advice as nonsense. The debates stay inside our echo chambers. Meanwhile, our clients feel the fallout. Bad frameworks, bad strategy, and bad design don’t just stay on the whiteboard—they have real-world consequences.

That’s the weight of the work we do.

Franke’s in Pictures Continued.

For more thoughts on brand design, advertising, and marketing, you can find me on LinkedIn.

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For anyone new here, I’m the founder of Woo Punch, a brand design studio rooted in marketing science.

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In seventh grade, my basketball team went 0-15. We spent so much time obsessing over complex plays on the whiteboard that we forgot the basics: dribbling, passing, and shooting.

I fear the design industry is making the same mistake.

We’ve abandoned the fundamentals of distinctive and timeless design to chase “brand love.” Designers are now expected to act as “brand strategists,” leading endless “design sprints” filled with personas, archetypes, and “onliness statements.” Meanwhile, creating truly distinctive and enduring brands has taken a backseat—all under the banner of “brand strategy.”

We mistake genuine brand strategy (essential for marketing success) for the design world's “brand strategy theater”—a mere performance of strategic rituals that prioritize the illusion of strategic depth over the fundamental principles of brand design.

This obsession with strategy, inspired by texts like Marty Neumeier’s The Brand Gap and promises of a “brand love” utopia, has steered us off course. It values theory over execution, workshops over design, and pseudoscientific frameworks over creating distinctive, lasting brand assets.

How did we get here? And more importantly, how do we return to designing brands that stand out and endure?

I challenge the cult of “brand love” and “brand strategy theater” with a powerful alternative: meaningless distinctiveness.

The Rise Of Brand Love

Driven by the pursuit of customer loyalty, the design industry is obsessed with an outdated distortion of brand strategy. This obsession is rooted in the theories of figures like Rosser Reeves, Jack Trout, and Kevin Roberts.

In the 1960s, Reeves discussed the Unique Selling Proposition, or USP. His idea was that brands should make clear and unique promises to customers to earn their loyalty. Trout, in his books Differentiate or Die and Positioning (co-written by Al Ries), took this further. He argued that brands must radically differentiate themselves to survive and that brands can “own” attributes and other associations, with loyalty as the reward. Then, in 2004, Roberts published Lovemarks.

Kevin Roberts spiritualized the business-centric approach of Reeves and Trout, framing emotional loyalty as a mission to “move the world” through love-inspired connections. Roberts elevated “loyalty beyond reason” to an almost sacred status.* He presented this idealized vision of customer devotion as the ultimate objective, the driving force behind successful brands, and a means of achieving world-changing influence.

*I unpack the moral implications of this framing here.

“Brand love,” in all its forms, reigns supreme in brand design today. Frameworks like “brand tribes,” “customer personas,” “onliness statements,” “brand purpose,” and “color psychology” are all deployed to serve the same objective: attracting an “ideal customer.”

Back in 2017, I fully bought into “brand love.” I shed my designer identity, adopting the roles of “brand strategist” and “brand matchmaker”—purportedly connecting brands with “the customer of their dreams.” Lost in the hype, I even considered outsourcing the actual design work—the reason clients hired me—to other designers.

But here’s the truth: Brand love, along with the loyalty myths it’s built upon, is a fantasy.

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Brand Love Exposed

The focus on brand love has led to the misconception that customer loyalty is the ultimate goal. This is also fueled by the oft-repeated myth: “It's 10 times more expensive to get a new customer.”

In reality, most of a successful brand's revenue comes from customers who buy occasionally or infrequently, not from a small group of super-loyal customers.

In 1969, Andrew Ehrenberg discovered that brand purchasing behavior aligns with a statistical pattern known as the Negative Binomial Distribution (NBD) curve. The NBD curve in marketing illustrates two core principles:

• Successful brands have very large numbers of light buyers, fewer medium buyers, and far fewer heavy buyers.

• Those very large numbers of light buyers account for far more sales revenue than the very small numbers of heavy buyers.

This pattern holds for successful B2C and B2B brands and even nonprofit donor bases, over 3-5 years—even for brands Kevin Roberts would call "lovemarks."

While brand love theory champions targeting a small group of “ideal customers,” the NBD curve reveals a different truth: brands should target all buyers, especially the often-overlooked, infrequent, and distracted ones.

As Byron Sharp of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute often describes it, customer loyalty is more like a “polygamous” relationship than a monogamous one. Most customers “loyally”—or rather, habitually—buy from 2-4 brands in a category. Their brand choices typically depend on which brands are readily available. A strong sense of brand devotion or fandom rarely drive their purchases.

The case against brand love is based on real data, while the case for brand love relies mostly on stories and anecdotes. “Brand love” believers often focus on extreme examples of brand loyalty, like Coca-Cola collectors or Lego fans.

These stories are interesting, but they don't represent most customers. The typical customer story—”Dad buys Legos one Christmas, and not the next”—isn't very exciting.

Sure, some people are really into Subaru or Patagonia. My father-in-law has a Harley-Davidson tattoo! But most people buy a Subaru because it's practical, not because they love dogs or the outdoors. College students might wear Patagonia because it's fashionable, not because they care about the company's environmentalism.*

My dad, a motorcycle enthusiast but not brand-loyal, once found a great deal on a Harley. He mostly wanted to show off the novelty of its loud engine in his garage. He rarely rode it and eventually sold it. He's typical. My father-in-law, on the other hand, is the exception. He bought his Harley secondhand, likely from someone like my dad.

*It's worth noting that even though Patagonia might have some very loyal customers, brands like Nike, Columbia, Under Armour, and L.L. Bean sell far more fleeces by targeting all buyers.

To further contrast brand love with reality, let's look at two contrasting quotes. Seth Godin has consistently pushed brand love theory—even popularizing the term “brand tribes.” Bob Hoffman has been an outspoken critic.

Which quote sounds more like your own buying habits?

Quote #1:

“People don’t buy products and services. They buy relations, stories, and magic.” - Seth Godin

Quote #2:

“Here's how marketers think: How can I engage consumers with my brand and create a community? How do I connect the authenticity of my brand with my target audience? How can I co-create with my target and develop a conversation?

Here's how consumers think: Is there gonna be parking? Is this f*cking thing gonna work?

For the most part, consumers do not want to have a conversation with your brand, or an authentic relationship with it, or engage with it, or co-create with it, or spend a romantic seaside weekend with it.

Of course, brand preferences exist...but brand love is a juvenile fantasy…”

- Bob Hoffman from his talk ”Marketers are from Mars, Consumers are from New Jersey.”

The seductive allure of “brand love,” with its promise of deep emotional connections between brands and consumers, often negatively impacts design.

Chasing “ideal customers” pushes designers towards fleeting trends and stereotypes, which alienate many potential customers. This constant chase for what's “in” creates a homogenized landscape where brands all look the same and quickly become outdated.

Furthermore, this pursuit of "brand love" has fueled an industry-wide obsession with workshops and frameworks, which create a mirage of strategic depth.

I call this phenomenon “brand strategy theater.” Brand strategy theater is the performance of strategic processes—workshops, frameworks, jargon—that create the illusion of strategic depth while neglecting the core principles of effective design.

This “theater,” involving everything from “design thinking” workshops to Lego exercises, lulls designers and clients into a false sense of security.

The Rise of “Brand Strategy Theater”

Today’s culture of brand strategy theater, at least within the design industry, has roots back to the late 1980s and early 2000s. Branding models like David Aaker’s Brand Identity Model (now called the Brand Vision Model) and Marty Neumeier’s The Brand Gap fundamentally shifted the design landscape by injecting brand strategy into a domain where it had previously played a minimal role.

Before Aaker’s work, brand strategy and design were separate fields. Brand strategists focused on positioning, messaging, and customer relationships. Designers handled visual identity and execution. Aaker’s Brand Identity Model changed that by introducing “Brand as Symbol,” placing design on the radar of brand strategists and, in turn, pushed designers to consider broader strategic concerns.

In the early 2000s, Neumeier’s The Brand Gap further solidified the connection. It claimed to “bridge the distance between business strategy and design.” Designers began seeing strategy as a golden goose. Neumeier’s later works introduced “design thinking” into branding, further cementing the importance of strategic exercises and a culture of “brand strategy workshops.”

While brand strategy is indispensable for overall brand building, guiding crucial decisions like messaging, positioning, distribution, pricing, and more, its direct application in the initial design and naming phases often proves counterproductive.

And yet, brand strategy has been elevated above idea creation and execution within the design process. Its integration has spawned a booming industry of workshops and frameworks, often adding layers of complexity where none is needed. Rather than improving brand design, the industry's fixation on a misguided version of brand strategy often undermines it.

The underlying issue is a set of flawed assumptions about brand strategy, assumptions that various thought leaders, including Marty Neumeier, have perpetuated.

The first flaw is the fixation on hyper-loyal customers, which pulls designers into a spiral of idealized audience profiles. These fictional consumers soon turn into stereotypes, with assumed tastes and aesthetics that justify generic, trend-driven design.

The second flaw is the assumption that brand strategy is static. Many treat it as something defined once and for all in a single workshop. However, these elaborate workshops often produce documents destined for the landfill. Real-world marketing quickly outgrows these theoretical exercises as brands evolve and expand.

These flawed assumptions, combined with the rise of “design thinking,” focus more on process than execution. This has created a perfect storm for “brand strategy theater,” churning out indistinguishable brands that fail to adapt to a dynamic market.

Even its most ardent supporters are not immune.

Chris Do, something of a disciple of Neumeier's and a vocal advocate applying brand strategy frameworks to design, ironically struggles to achieve distinctive results. He founded The Futur, the most influential educational resource for designers, and also runs the design agency Blind. In an attempt to demonstrate the branding process on The Futur's “Building a Brand” YouTube series, his agency, Blind, branded a brewery. The resulting logo, a clichéd hop design, underscores the limitations of these frameworks.

The team at The Futur fell into the same trap as many others influenced by these frameworks. They sidelined core design principles in favor of an overcomplicated strategy and an obsession with customer fandom.

In contrast, some of the most influential brand designers have designed iconic, enduring brands without adhering to rigid strategic formulas.

A 1991 Miggs B on TV interview with Paul Rand sharply contrasts with the “brand strategy theater” discussed earlier. As “Miggs B” searched for deep strategic meaning in the IBM and Westinghouse logos, Rand dismissed the over-analysis, emphasizing practical design decisions. The IBM logo has eight bars—not for symbolism, but because more would blur the lines and fewer would weaken the letterforms. The Westinghouse logo’s dots made an otherwise generic letter more distinctive.

This pragmatic approach is echoed by other leading designers: Pentagram partner Natasha Jen has dismissed design thinking as “bullshit,” both Michael Bierut and Sagi Haviv have articulated that great logos don’t usually have inherent meaning, and even Michael Johnson, designer and author of a best-selling book on brand strategy, critiques the workshop industry that has emerged over the last 20 years.

Their work demonstrates that lasting brand design isn’t the result of complicated strategy workshops or theoretical exercises. While brand strategy plays a vital role in other areas of business, true longevity in design comes from distinctive and timeless solutions that stand out and endure

The design industry's obsession with “brand strategy theater” is not just a harmless fad. It’s a fundamental misdirection. We are not only failing to create distinctive brands, but we are actively engineering a world of indistinguishable, forgettable, trendy, and ultimately ineffective brands.

Let’s examine some widely used strategies that, despite their popularity, often do more harm than good in the pursuit of strong brand design:

• Color Psychology - Color Psychology suggests colors evoke specific emotions (e.g., blue = trust, red = passion). However, when competing brands apply this logic, they naturally appeal to the same emotional needs. This leads them to choose the same colors. As a result, brands within a category start to blend. This makes it harder for customers to distinguish one from another, such as the prevalence of blue in banking.

  Furthermore, color connotations are also context-dependent and vary across cultures.

  Lastly, advocates often force-fit brands into preconceived theories. This is evident in the numerous inconsistencies of widely circulated color psychology charts. For example, below Monster Energy is included under “peaceful,” Cartoon Network under “balanced,” Texaco under “exciting,” Twitter under “trustworthy,” and Harley-Davidson under “friendly."

• Onliness Statements - Onliness Statements—Marty Neumeier’s concept, rooted in Rosser Reeves' USP and Jack Trout's Differentiate or Die—suggests that brands can achieve exclusive market ownership of a differentiator. For example, Harley-Davidson “owns” big, loud motorcycles. While marketing scientists have largely discredited this theory, it persists in the design industry, due in part to Neumeier’s The Brand Gap.

  Mark Ritson’s “Relative Differentiation” offers a more realistic view. For example, Harley-Davidson is more associated with big, loud motorcycles than most. Yet, even this requires significant investment and can sometimes backfire. Harley’s fixation on “big and loud” has limited its success in foreign markets and the emerging EV space.

  Ultimately, the differentiation debate is largely irrelevant to brand designers.

  Brands change. Brand assets must endure. Onliness statements act like a straightjacket, forcing designers to hyper-target current positioning rather than future growth. So, when an inevitable shift occurs, a costly rebrand is required. Designers win. Clients lose.

• Customer Personas - By relying on narrow, generational stereotypes within the identity design process, customer personas can limit a brand’s ability to connect with the broader category. This is true even if targeting a specific group initially makes sense, as it can hinder the brand’s potential to expand and resonate with a wider audience later.

  For example, defining audiences by age often leads to an over-reliance on fleeting trends, like warped psychedelic fonts or “dopamine design” for Gen-Z and “boho minimalism” for Millennial women. This risks immediate alienation of higher-spending segments and long-term obsolescence as trends fade. Design trends also lead to short-term category sameness, as brands chase the same aesthetics.

  Within individual communications to narrower segments like Gen-Z, design trends can be useful. However, this approach works only if core assets—such as logos—remain timeless. Timeless assets provide the flexibility needed for evolving marketing strategies while preserving a brand's identity and stability over the long term.

  Ultimately, relying too heavily on personas that focus on narrow segments limits a brand’s broader market potential now and in the future.

  

Our clients deserve better than “brand strategy theater.” We must adopt a simpler approach to brand design. This approach should be rooted in the fundamentals of distinctiveness and timelessness.

I suggest we replace “brand love” and its offspring, “brand strategy theater,” with a radically different approach: “meaningless distinctiveness.”

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The Case For Meaningless Distinctiveness

Brand design isn’t about impressing or attracting attention—it's about being remembered.

Every exposure—whether on a store shelf, billboard, or social media—contributes to recognition, which builds trust and drives brand growth. Without recognition, consumers are unlikely to purchase.

But, not all brand exposures are created equal.

Recognition depends on distinctiveness. Generic brands blend in, requiring more exposure to build recognition, while distinctive brands stand out quickly and are easier to recall.

Research from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute suggests that distinctiveness is the key to impactful brand design. The Institute defines “distinctive brand assets” as core elements that drive quick brand recognition, like jingles, colors, logos, and mascots.

In their book, Building Distinctive Brand Assets, the Institute argues that radical distinctiveness through audio and visual cues is vital for brand growth.

Few designers would dispute the importance of distinctiveness in brand design.

However, the Institute takes this concept further, advocating for “meaningless distinctiveness”—unexpected elements like the Geico gecko, the Lacoste crocodile, or the Coca-Cola polar bears. While these symbols aren't entirely meaningless (as all objects or animals carry some inherent significance), they are deliberately unrelated to their industries.

This approach allows brands to radically stand out in the market long-term, minimizing customer confusion and accelerating brand recognition. By using distinctive elements that don’t have obvious ties to the industry, brands can create a unique identity that is instantly recognizable.

Meaningless brand assets offer several key advantages:

• Memorability. Meaningless assets cut through the clutter, making brands more memorable than those relying on category-related imagery.

  Most designers are familiar with obvious examples of this, like spines for chiropractors and coffee beans for coffee shops.

  

  However, even relying on entire design styles—such as hyper-masculine aesthetics for energy drinks and detailed illustrations for organic foods—can hinder memorability.

  

• Longevity. Meaningless assets, by their very nature, are less likely to be considered by others, minimizing the chance of unintentional duplication from competitors.

• Flexibility. Meaningless assets are not tied down to a single product offering or differentiator.

  The lack of meaning between fruit and tech lets Apple effortlessly transcend specific products. Their logo adorns computers, phones, watches, VR headsets, and even credit cards. Simultaneously, Apple’s meaningless assets enable marketing campaigns to seamlessly transition from playful dancing silhouettes to serious fraud awareness initiatives.

Unlike “brand love” and “design thinking,” meaningless distinctiveness offers a more direct approach, allowing designers to focus on creating effective brand assets.

That said, some designers may still find frameworks helpful to spark creativity, and that’s perfectly fine—as long as the framework doesn’t take over the execution.

Even for brands focused on “brand love,” meaningless distinctiveness—think of the Apple name and logo or the Starbucks mermaid—can be a powerful visual foundation.

Meaningless Distinctiveness Strategies

Designing with meaningless distinctiveness doesn’t mean drawing random symbols from a hat. Strategy can still play a critical role.

Below are some tips and tricks that will significantly impact the effectiveness of meaningless assets:

1. Research your competitors’ design assets to ensure radical distinctiveness.

   Research existing names and brand assets in your category (regional, national, and international) using Google Images and trademark databases. Avoid any conceptually similar ideas, even if you think your variation on the idea is unique. Be sure to check for available domain names when creating a brand name. Skimping on this research is a recipe for unoriginal—and potentially illegal—branding.

2. Look for asset ideas that are familiar, yet distinctive.

   To achieve stronger brand recognition, leverage the power of familiar imagery—but in the unexpected context of an industry. Using familiar imagery like animals (Lacoste, John Deere) or objects (Apple, Domino's) in unrelated industries boosts memorability.

   

3. Aim for visual brand names where possible.

   While established brands face limitations, building a brand from scratch allows for a visually representable name (e.g., Apple, Shell, Domino's, John Deere). This combination of name and correlating visual assets accelerates brand recognition.

   Many iconic brands stumbled upon this powerful synergy by chance.

   

   

4. When the client is looking for meaning, get creative.

   Designers and clients can have it both ways. Internal meaning in a brand asset can be powerful, as long as it’s not burdened by any inherent or intuitive link to the category. Gatorade's name is intertwined with the Florida Gators college football team, but many consumers don't know, forget, or don’t care.

   Here are some other examples of “meaningless” assets with deep internal significance, as well as some that are much more random:

   • Mercedes Benz: For the Daimler brothers, the three-pointed star logo was sentimental. It originated from a symbol used in a postcard from their late father, to mark their home.

   • Wendy’s: Wendy’s was named after Dave Thomas’ red-headed daughter.

   • NBC: The NBC Peacock originally symbolized NBC’s venture into color TV. For obvious reasons, color is not significant to NBC’s positioning today.

   • Aflac & Geico: The Aflac Duck and the Geico Gecko were much more serendipitous. Both mascots stemmed from how their brand names sounded similar to a duck’s quack and “gecko,” respectively.

   • McDonald's: The McDonald’s arches were also serendipitous. Ray Kroc, seeking to make his restaurants stand out, instructed his architect to “design something unique.” This led to the distinctive yellow arches on their earlier buildings. After viewing the arches from an angle one day, Jim Schindler, head of engineering and design at McDonald’s, realized they formed the letter “m.” The iconic logo was born.

     

     

   The inspiration for “meaningless distinctiveness” can be surprisingly diverse. My own creative process has involved exploring various avenues. Below are a few examples of names and distinctive brand assets I've developed for clients, along with the random inspiration behind them:

5. Trust yourself and your clients’ intuition to design appropriate assets for the brand.

   By “appropriate”—a term I've borrowed from logo designer Sagi Haviv—I mean that the asset feels natural within the brand's context and doesn’t alienate potential buyers. This applies to logos, mascots, jingles, or other distinctive brand assets. Be careful not to conflate appropriate with meaningful or you may fall into the trap of a category cliché. The goal is simple: create something that fits—and for brand mascots, isn't too annoying.
   

6. Limit your use of Pinterest, Behance, Instagram, and other design inspiration sites to avoid design trends.

   Avoid using popular platforms like Pinterest, especially for logos, as they prioritize fleeting trends.

   Instead, study timeless design examples of graphic identities like those from Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv or Pentagram. For brand mascots, watch the ads of those that have changed very little over time (Geico, KFC, Hotels.com, Aflac, Energizer, Pillsbury, Michelin, Captain Morgan, Duolingo, M&M’s, Charmin).

   

   

   ---

If you keep these basic strategies in mind, the world is your oyster. Even an oyster could be your oyster!

Our Clients Deserve Better.

The design industry has gotten tangled up in the fantasy of “brand love” and the performance of “brand strategy theater.”

We’ve spent too much time chasing trends and complicated frameworks, forgetting the basics of effective brand design: distinctiveness and timelessness. We’ve been sold on exclusive loyalty and perfect customers, only to realize that brand design success comes from recognition, not manufactured love.

The truth is, brand loyalty is more complicated than we’ve been led to believe, and long-term growth isn’t about catering to a few, it’s about reaching the many.

It's time for a course correction.

We need to move past the fluff of flawed frameworks and workshops that focus on the process instead of the design itself. Let’s ditch the pursuit of “brand love” and embrace something simpler but more powerful: “meaningless distinctiveness.” This doesn’t mean picking random stuff out of thin air—it means carefully designing memorable, unique brand assets that radically stand out, have broad appeal, and last.

By leaning into the unexpected, the familiar yet distinct, and the deliberately meaningless, we can create brands that get noticed and stick in people’s minds. It’s about going back to the fundamentals, cutting through the noise, and building brands that last.

We owe it to our clients to get this right.

They’re the ones who end up paying the price for all the buzzwords and empty frameworks that don’t deliver. It’s time we stop wasting their resources and company time on ineffective strategies and start building truly distinctive, timeless brands that work for them.

For more thoughts on brand design, advertising, and marketing, you can find me on LinkedIn.

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For more thoughts on brand design, advertising, and marketing, you can find me on LinkedIn.

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THE SUPER BOWL COMMERCIAL MYTH

The most incredible Super Bowl ads are clever, emotional, funny, and inspirational.

We’ve all bought into this myth. But does it hold true, considering what we’ve learned about consumer behavior from marketing science, behavioral science, and advertising psychology? Was 2011’s VW ad “The Force” effective at selling VWs? Or is AngelSoft’s semi-annoying ad from this year a better (and more realistic) standard for advertisers to aspire to?

Which ads will help the brands being advertised sell products, and which ads might simply help the creative agencies behind them win awards?

Below is the explanation for my rating system. If you would like to skip ahead, feel free to scroll past my 5 Keys.

THE 5 KEYS TO AN EFFECTIVE SUPER BOWL AD

I believe there are 5 keys to an effective ad based on the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute’s research into marketing effectiveness, Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman’s research into behavioral science, and Robert Heath’s research into the psychology of advertising. These 5 keys are Distinctiveness, Consistency, Broad-Reach, Category Entry Points, and Attention.

Certainly, other factors can go into whether or not an ad is effective, but the following 5 keys should be the primary objectives of any effective ad.

Each key is not created equal so I gave them different weights. For example, if a Super Bowl ad is clever and funny (scores well in Attention), but the brand being advertised is lost in the mix (scores poorly in Distinctiveness), that ad will have a lower grade than a boring but well-branded ad. That’s because Distinctiveness is far more important than Attention.

You can read more detail about these keys in my Super Bowl article from 2022 but I will summarize them here.

To grade this year’s ads, as always, I assigned the following percentages to each key:

DISTINCTIVENESS - 65%

The first key factor for an effective Super Bowl ad is distinctiveness, and I estimate that distinctiveness accounts for up to 65% of an ad’s effectiveness. If an ad isn't strongly linked to the brand being advertised throughout using distinctive audio, thematic, and visual cues, it will essentially be a waste of money. We won’t know who was advertised.

Despite this, many brands sacrifice these cues in favor of emotional narratives, virtue signaling, or humor. Advertisers often treat ads like short films aimed at winning creative awards, not tools to sell products. This is a mistake.

CONSISTENCY - 20%

The second biggest factor for an effective Super Bowl ad is consistency. I estimate consistency accounts for up to 20% of an ad's effectiveness.

If the brand being advertised has never been advertised before, or the brand has consistently advertised, but its Super Bowl ad is dramatically different from all of its other ads, consumers will find it hard to link the ad to its correct brand.

BROAD-REACH - 8%

The third factor is broad-reach. As a whole, broad-reach is more important than consistency and sometimes even distinctiveness. I estimate that broad-reaching advertising channels account for as much as 80% of advertising effectiveness in some cases. But here, I'm grading content, not advertising channels.

As a result, I estimate that broad-reaching messaging or content accounts for around 8% of a Super Bowl ad's effectiveness relative to all other key factors. Instead of catering to a specific demographic or psychographic, Super Bowl ads should target all category buyers with their messaging and content.

CATEGORY ENTRY POINTS (CEPs) - 5%

The 4th most significant factor for an effective ad is Category Entry Points (CEPs).

Rather than differentiating your brand, you should try to tap into why consumers buy from your category in the first place before they even consider brands. Most consumers don’t perceive the differences between brands. Therefore, while differentiation can be effective for niche brands targeting heavy category buyers looking for additional customization, it's costly to establish a differentiator among distracted buyers who are the key to long-term growth. By prioritizing CEPs the goal is to simply be considered in various buying situations.

Again, I explain this in more detail in my 2022 article.

While CEPs are extremely helpful, they take a lot of time and repetition to build. Because of this, I'm grading individual ads here without considering a brand's overall advertising, so I estimate CEPs account for around 5% of an ad’s effectiveness during stand-alone Super Bowl ads.

ATTENTION - 2%

Finally, attention is the least important (but still critical) key to an effective ad.

While marketing gurus and the general public think attention is the most essential key for a Super Bowl ad, attention is complicated and misunderstood. There are several types of attention and not all are good when it comes to advertising. High attention can even have a negative effect on sales. I estimate that attention accounts for around 2% of Super Bowl ad effectiveness.

My estimates for each key aren't an exact science, and there are additional keys that can be helpful that I don't discuss here, but I wanted to grade these ads on the most critical factors.

MY GRADES FOR THIS YEAR’S SUPER BOWL ADS

MY TOP 5 BEST

Strengths:

• The Reese’s brand couldn’t be much stronger here. Even casual viewers glancing up from their phones or engaging in Super Bowl party conversations are likely to register the brand being advertised.

• People running toward lava to eat it will certainly make viewers look up and it’s a pretty universally funny concept.

Weaknesses:

• Whenever a brand tries to be funny there is always a risk the joke will bomb. If/when that happens, some eye-rolling might occur. For a brand like Reese’s, it’s doubtful that will effect people’s desire to eat the beloved candy.

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