What the Eiffel Tower Can Teach Us About Branding

Think of Paris and there is a good chance you picture the Eiffel Tower. Think of London and Big Ben might appear in your mind, while Sydney can immediately bring up the distinctive sails of the Sydney Opera House. You do not need to see the name of the city alongside them because the image itself is enough to trigger the association.

These landmarks are not distinctive brand assets in the traditional marketing sense, but they behave remarkably like them. They have become powerful shortcuts in our memory, and that is exactly what brands should be trying to create with their own distinctive assets.

Branding is about recognition

A strong brand should be recognisable through more than its logo or name. Colours, shapes, typography, characters, sounds, packaging, phrases and graphical devices can all help someone identify who a piece of communication belongs to before they have consciously read the brand name.

McDonald's has the golden arches, Nike has the swoosh, Cadbury has purple and Coca-Cola has built recognition around its red, script and bottle shape. The strongest distinctive assets make identifying the brand easier, which is incredibly valuable when consumers are exposed to enormous amounts of information every day.

The aim is to build the same sort of mental shortcut we have with famous landmarks. If you see the silhouette of the Eiffel Tower, your brain does not need much additional information before arriving at Paris.

Fame and uniqueness matter

There is more to this than simply choosing a colour or creating an interesting shape. Distinctive brand assets can be thought about in terms of Fame and Uniqueness: how many people associate the asset with you, and how strongly that asset belongs to you rather than your competitors.

The landmark analogy explains this beautifully. There are thousands of towers around the world, but the shape of the Eiffel Tower points overwhelmingly towards Paris. There are countless impressive buildings beside water, but the Sydney Opera House is so distinctive that its silhouette immediately connects with Sydney.

The same principle applies to brands. Being recognisable is useful, but the real goal is for the asset to make people recognise you.

Consistency is where the value is built

This is where many organisations make life unnecessarily difficult for themselves. They create a brand identity, use it for a while and then people inside the business start becoming bored with it.

A designer wants to try something different, a new campaign gets a completely different look or somebody decides a familiar asset has been overused. The problem is that the marketing team might have seen that asset hundreds of times while the average customer may only have noticed it three or four times.

That creates an important distinction. What feels repetitive inside an organisation can still be building familiarity outside it.

Imagine Paris deciding the Eiffel Tower had appeared in too much tourism marketing and needed replacing with something fresher. London could decide Big Ben was becoming predictable, while Sydney might decide the Opera House had been used for long enough. It sounds ridiculous because the accumulated recognition of those assets is precisely what makes them so valuable.

Brands should be careful not to throw away their own recognition for the same reason.

Consistency does not mean everything looks the same

Protecting distinctive assets does not mean every advert, social post or campaign needs to be identical. Creativity can change around the assets while the important memory cues remain consistent.

Nike can produce completely different campaigns while retaining the swoosh. Coca-Cola can change its advertising ideas, photography and messaging while continuing to reinforce assets that have been associated with the brand for decades.

The creative execution can evolve while the things you want people to remember stay familiar. That gives marketers freedom without constantly asking the audience to relearn who the communication belongs to.

You cannot simply declare something distinctive

It is also worth remembering that putting a colour or graphical element into a brand guidelines document does not automatically make it a distinctive brand asset. The audience has to learn the association.

That requires repeated exposure over time. If you want people to associate a particular colour, shape, phrase or character with your organisation, you have to keep using it consistently enough for that connection to form in their memory.

This may matter even more for smaller organisations with limited marketing budgets. When you cannot spend millions building recognition, every interaction needs to reinforce the ones that came before it rather than starting again with a completely different identity.

What is your Eiffel Tower?

The useful question for any organisation is therefore not simply, "Do we have a nice brand?" It is whether there are particular assets that people could eventually learn to associate specifically with you.

Maybe it is a colour, a shape, a character, a phrase, a sound or something else entirely. Whatever it is, the challenge is not only creating it but having the discipline to keep using it long enough for people to remember it.

The Eiffel Tower, Big Ben and Sydney Opera House show just how powerful a visual association can become. Brands operate on a much smaller scale, but the principle is the same: create something distinctive, reinforce it consistently and give people enough opportunities to connect that asset with you.

Every brand might not literally have an Eiffel Tower, but every strong brand should be trying to build one.