Distinctive Assets and Category Entry Points dominate brand thinking today. But are they the key to growth?
Distinctive Assets are the recognisable, non-verbal cues, colours, logos, sounds, shapes, that let people identify a brand instantly. Category Entry Points are the moments or needs that bring a brand to mind when someone's ready to buy. Together they're the backbone of much modern brand growth strategy.
Yes, distinctive assets and mental availability are important but they are often not the driving factors behind brand growth.
If you've sat in a brand strategy session in the last few years, you'll know the script. Be distinctive. Own your codes. Nail your sonic logo. Build mental availability. Category entry points, fame and uniqueness grids, the whole toolkit borrowed from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute.
It's good thinking, and it can be highly impactful in the right context. But spend enough time looking at the fastest growing brands across a range of sectors and you notice many are succeeding without following this playbook. No mascot. Forgettable colour palette. Nobody could hum their sonic logo. And yet they're taking real share off much bigger, much more distinctive incumbents who have embedded their recognisable logos and brand palettes in all of our minds.
So what's actually driving their growth? Mostly, it goes back to the fundamentals of the brand and something a lot of the latest thinking eschews, what is the value the brand can deliver to consumers and audiences in the first place. These brands who do it differently found an audience need that wasn't being met in full, built something that met it better than the alternatives, and let the product and experience they offer do the talking.
There's an old line, usually credited to Jeff Bezos, that your brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room. That idea got quietly crowded out by frameworks that are easier to measure and put in a deck. But look at where growth is actually happening and it's arguably truer now than ever, just harder to see, because most of that conversation has moved into DMs and group chats rather than public feeds.
What Distinctive Assets are actually good at
But let's be fair to the theory before we poke at it. Distinctive Assets and Category Entry Points are genuinely well-evidenced for what they narrowly claim: they help an established brand get noticed faster, remembered correctly, and chosen again with less friction. That matters most where the purchase is low engagement and low effort, and where several competitors could reasonably fill the same need. In those conditions, being the brand that springs to mind fastest, on the shelf, in search results and on the high street, really matters when it comes to being shortlisted.
Quick clarification, because CEPs get talked about in need-based language too, occasions, moments, triggers, and it's fair to ask how that's different from what we're arguing here. The difference is what the need-language is actually for. CEP work uses those moments to work out when a brand should come to mind, not whether it's actually the right choice once it does. That second question, whether the brand is genuinely the best answer to the need, is what this piece is really about.
But that story is not true of many of the brands who have really taken off in a digital-first world. It says less about how a brand earns customers in the first place, buying journeys that are more considered (of which there are many), the value a brand delivers or the word of mouth that has been the springboard for growth for many of today's fast moving brands. Yes, some of these brands may have distinctive assets, but many did not when they started. It was not how they grew.
When people go looking, unknowns get a way in
There's another weakness the DA and CEP theory doesn't deal with well. It assumes buyers default to whatever's already sitting in memory. Fair enough for low-stakes purchases. Much weaker once someone's about to commit to something that actually matters to them like long term contracts, sunscriptions and big ticket purchases.
The more considered, expensive or important a purchase is, the more likely someone is to go and actively look: search, read reviews, ask people they trust, compare. The moment that starts, a brand they'd never heard of a week ago is suddenly in the running, judged on the same terms as the easily recalled names. Recall and recognition don't get you very far here. What matters is whether you compare well when someone's actually looking, and whether what they find stands up to scrutiny. That's a research and reputation game, not a memory game, and it's exactly the door a lot of these newer brands have walked through.
The brands actually breaking through
WiiM, the audio tech brand, has been quietly taking share from Sonos with almost none of the classic brand furniture. What it has is a genuinely better, cheaper multi-room streaming experience and an app that works, arriving right as Sonos's own app was falling apart. Audiophile forums and hi-fi review sites did the rest.
Oura and Whoop are fighting for the wearable health market almost entirely on product terms. Whoever's sleep science and recovery scoring is currently better wins the next round of comparison reviews. Oura's own leadership describes its growth explicitly as word of mouth, people talking about their sleep scores the way they used to talk about their Airbnb trip.
Nebula, the creator-owned streaming platform, has never run an ad or hired a publicist. It grows because creators tell their audiences directly to come and watch something, inherited trust doing the acquisition work, and it shows in an unusually strong retention rate for a subscription business.
Framework, the repairable laptop company, built its following around one real value proposition: a laptop you can actually fix and upgrade. It gets covered relentlessly by tech reviewers and right-to-repair communities because it does something meaningfully different, not because of how it looks on a shelf.
You can see the same shape at bigger scale too. Revolut broke into UK banking, a category stuffed with heritage names and heavy marketing spend, on one narrow but genuinely painful problem: banks and cards quietly taking a cut every time you spent or transferred money abroad. Solve that one thing properly, in an app that didn't feel like a bank, and people told their friends before their next holiday. Everything else Revolut now offers came after that initial foothold, not before it. These people weren't going to choose a more familiar bank over a new upstart with a better value proposition just because they could easily recall the black horse or blue eagle of the leading bank brands. Figma didn't out-recognise Adobe, it rebuilt design as something you do together in a browser, and every shared file became its own tiny piece of viral growth. ChatGPT is maybe the purest version of this: essentially no brand investment, just raw utility, spreading person to person because it was genuinely useful.
The common thread: they found where the value lives
None of these are anti-branding stories. What they share is that the growth work happened upstream of branding entirely. Somebody did the hard bit first: understood a real, specific audience need, the jobs people were trying to get done, the pain of their current options, the results they were hoping for, and built or repositioned a product that delivered against that better than the alternative on the table.
Worth being specific on one thing: value doesn't only show up as a feature or a price point. The experience itself, how something feels to use, to contact, to rely on, is very often the actual point of difference. Revolut's edge was how fast and painless the whole thing felt. WiiM's edge wasn't a spec sheet, it was an app that just worked and continues to be rapidly iterated with user community input, while Sonos's fell over. Figma's disruption was largely a UX idea: what if design was collaborative and didn’t require software downloads. Pain and gain aren't only about what a product does, they're just as often about what it's like to actually use the thing, and that's squarely CX and UX territory, not traditional branding territory.
We've covered Jobs to be Done and Switching Forces as the frameworks for doing this work properly, so we won't repeat it here. The short version: growth like this doesn't come from a workshop about brand personality or having the most recognisable brand assets. It comes from real insight into what your audience is actually trying to achieve, what's getting in their way, and where a genuine gap sits between what they need and what they're currently being offered.
Is the focus out of balance?
We're not saying that Distinctive Assets and Category Entry Points don't matter. They do, especially once you've found real product-market fit and need to defend it against competitors who can mostly match your proposition. A brand with something genuinely good to offer and no way to be recognised again is leaving growth on the table. It is something growing brands should invest in.
The concern is focus. An enormous amount of brand strategy time, boardroom air and research budget goes into CEPs and DAs, relative to how much goes into value proposition, product-market fit and experience. Heritage and distinctive assets count for little against a superior proposition, better experience and a swell of genuine advocates.
If you want durable growth, brands should be focusing their efforts on the value work first. Get close enough to your audience to understand their needs, pain points and gains, and build or reposition something that meets those better than anyone else in the category. Once you know what that value is, distinctiveness becomes a genuinely useful tool for making people notice and remember it. Do it the other way round, and you risk a new entrant delivering something better and winning market share, often without the distinctive assets or CEPs of the incumbents.
Example streaming media case study:
TV Jobs to be Done & Audience Segmentation
We partnered with ITV to develop two integrated segmentation solutions, created to drive product and marketing strategy for its video streaming service, ITVX. Our solution blended a customer-centric lens, using Jobs-to-be-Done data, with a commercial-based solution based on customer value. In-depth Personas were created from immersive qualitative research with the segments to build empathy and provide actionability.
