Every Brand Needs an Eiffel Tower

Think of Paris and there is a good chance the Eiffel Tower appears somewhere in your mind. Think of London and you might picture Big Ben. Think of Sydney and the sails of the Sydney Opera House are probably not far behind.

None of these were created as distinctive brand assets in the traditional marketing sense, but they behave remarkably like them. They have become visual shortcuts in our memory. We often do not need to see the word Paris, London or Sydney because the image itself does the work.

That is exactly the kind of relationship brands should be trying to create with their own distinctive assets.

The Eiffel Tower, Big Ben and Sydney Opera House demonstrate what happens when something becomes strongly and repeatedly associated with a particular place. Over time, the connection becomes almost automatic. The image triggers the place before we have consciously thought about it.

Strong brands are trying to achieve something remarkably similar.

Your brain loves shortcuts

We sometimes talk about branding as though customers are carefully studying everything businesses put in front of them. They are not.

Most people are not analysing a logo, reading every social post, admiring a typeface or consciously considering whether a particular shade of blue belongs to one organisation rather than another. They are moving quickly through the world, scrolling through feeds, walking through shops, watching videos, checking emails and processing countless pieces of information.

That makes recognition incredibly valuable.

A distinctive brand asset gives the brain a shortcut. Instead of having to read the company name or understand the entire advert, something within the communication can immediately signal who it belongs to.

That could be a colour, symbol, character, sound, shape, typeface, pattern, slogan, packaging style or another recognisable element.

McDonald's has its golden arches. Nike has the swoosh. Coca-Cola has red, its script and its distinctive bottle shape. Cadbury has spent years building an association with purple.

The strongest assets start doing some of the identification work before the brand name is even noticed.

Recognition is not enough

There is an important distinction here because simply having recognisable branding does not automatically mean you have strong distinctive assets.

One useful way of thinking about distinctive assets is through two ideas: fame and uniqueness.

Fame is about how many people associate the asset with your brand. Uniqueness is about whether they associate that asset specifically with you rather than several competitors.

The landmark analogy makes this easier to understand.

There are thousands of clocks around the world, but show someone the silhouette of the Elizabeth Tower housing Big Ben and many people will immediately think of London. There are countless towers, but the shape of the Eiffel Tower is extraordinarily difficult to separate from Paris. There are numerous impressive buildings beside water, but the silhouette of the Sydney Opera House is instantly connected with Sydney.

That gives us an important branding lesson.

Being recognisable is not enough. The asset needs to make people recognise you.

A company could decide tomorrow that blue is going to become one of its core brand assets, but simply using blue does not make it distinctive. The audience needs to repeatedly encounter that blue alongside the brand until the association begins to form.

Even then, if every competitor in the category is using a similar shade, uniqueness becomes difficult.

Distinctiveness has to be built.

The asset is only half the job

Businesses often put enormous energy into creating a new visual identity.

There are workshops, presentations, mood boards, colour palettes, fonts, logos, graphical devices and brand guidelines. Everyone eventually agrees on the new identity and the brand is launched.

Then something strange happens.

Six months later, people inside the organisation become bored with it.

The marketing team has seen the same graphical device hundreds of times. Designers want to experiment with a different colour. Someone launches a campaign and decides the normal brand style does not quite suit it. Another department starts creating its own materials and introduces a slightly different interpretation.

Slowly, the consistency begins to disappear.

The problem is that the people managing a brand experience it completely differently from the people buying from it.

A marketer might have seen a particular brand asset 500 times this year. A potential customer might have noticed it three times.

That creates a dangerous gap.

Brand teams experience repetition. Customers experience consistency.

What feels repetitive internally might only just be starting to become familiar externally.

Imagine if cities constantly rebranded themselves

Imagine if Paris decided people were bored with the Eiffel Tower.

It had appeared on too many posters, souvenirs and tourism campaigns, so the city decided it needed something fresh. For the next campaign it used the Arc de Triomphe instead. The following year it moved to a croissant. Then someone decided a completely new graphical symbol would better represent modern Paris.

Every one of those ideas might work creatively.

But none would have the accumulated recognition of the Eiffel Tower.

The same applies to London deciding Big Ben had become predictable or Sydney deciding the Opera House had been overused.

The very reason those landmarks are powerful symbols is because the association has been reinforced again and again.

Brands sometimes throw that advantage away because they mistake familiarity for fatigue.

We become desperate to show customers something new when customers have barely learnt what the existing thing means.

Consistency does not mean boring

There is an understandable fear that consistent branding means every advert, social post, webpage and piece of content has to look identical.

It does not.

Consistency should not restrict creativity. It should give creativity recognisable boundaries.

A brand can tell hundreds of different stories while retaining a handful of consistent memory cues. Campaign concepts can change. Photography can change. Copy can change. Content formats can change.

The important distinctive elements stay recognisable.

Nike does not create the same advert repeatedly, but the swoosh remains. Coca-Cola has produced dramatically different campaigns across decades while continuing to reinforce assets people associate with Coca-Cola.

The execution evolves while the memory structures remain.

That should be the ambition.

Not consistency for consistency's sake, but enough consistency that every new piece of marketing strengthens something that already exists.

Small brands probably need consistency even more

This matters particularly for smaller businesses and organisations.

Large consumer brands can spend millions repeatedly exposing people to their identities. Smaller organisations rarely have that luxury.

That means every impression needs to work harder.

If your website looks like one organisation, your social media looks like another, your signage uses a different visual style and your next campaign introduces a completely new colour palette, each interaction has to start rebuilding recognition.

Instead of your marketing activity accumulating, it fragments.

This is why smaller brands should probably be even more protective of their strongest assets.

If you have a colour people are beginning to associate with you, keep building it. If a particular shape, phrase, character or graphical device is becoming recognisable, resist the temptation to replace it simply because you have been looking at it for too long.

You may be tired of it.

Your audience might only just be noticing it.

You cannot just declare something distinctive

There is another trap worth avoiding.

An asset does not become distinctive because somebody puts it in a brand guidelines document.

A business cannot simply choose a colour on Monday and announce that it is now a distinctive brand asset.

The association has to be built through repeated exposure.

If you want people to connect a particular colour with your organisation, they need to repeatedly encounter that colour in connection with you. If you want a character, shape or phrase to become part of your identity, you need to consistently reinforce it across multiple touchpoints.

That takes time.

The Eiffel Tower has accumulated more than a century of association with Paris. Brands obviously do not need to wait generations, but the underlying principle remains the same.

Memory is built through repetition and reinforcement.

What is your Eiffel Tower?

That is perhaps the most useful question to take from all of this.

What could your brand consistently build until people recognise you before they have even read your name?

It might already exist.

Perhaps there is a colour you use frequently, a symbol people recognise, a particularly distinctive product shape or an element of your visual identity that deserves far greater prominence.

Alternatively, you might realise that you have no consistent assets at all because every campaign is treated as a fresh creative exercise.

Either way, the answer is unlikely to be creating ten new things.

It is probably identifying a small number of elements worth owning and then having the discipline to keep reinforcing them.

Because the real power of the Eiffel Tower, Big Ben or the Sydney Opera House is not simply that they are distinctive structures.

It is the strength of the association they have built in our memories.

Brands should aim for the same thing.

Create something recognisable, make sure it is uniquely yours, use it consistently and give people enough opportunities to learn what it means.

Every brand might not literally have an Eiffel Tower.

But every strong brand should be trying to build one.