Brand Codes vs Category Codes: Why Fitting In Kills Brands

Take your last ad and cover the logo. Then show it to someone who doesn’t work for you and ask whose ad it is. If they name your biggest competitor, or shrug, you have met the problem this article is about. Most of what went into that ad was saying what category you are in. Very little of it was saying who you are.

Those are two different jobs, done by two different kinds of signal. Marketers usually treat them as one, and it quietly costs them the memory their advertising was meant to build.

Brand codes and category codes, defined

Brand codes are the elements, other than your name, that make people think of your brand specifically: a color, a shape, a logo, a character, a sound, a tagline, a style of photography. Professor Jenni Romaniuk of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute calls them distinctive brand assets and, as Mark Ritson summarizes her definition, describes them as the non-name elements that trigger brand recall among category buyers. Ritson himself uses the term brand codes. They mean essentially the same thing.

Category codes are the conventions a whole category shares. They tell people what kind of product this is, not whose it is: the earthy tones and leaf imagery that say natural, the dark bags and origin maps that say specialty coffee, the navy and serif type that say serious financial institution. Nobody owns them. Every brand in the category uses them, which is exactly why they work as signals of the category.

The test that separates them is simple. A brand code points to one brand. A category code points to all of them.

Why category codes are necessary, and why they are dangerous

Category codes aren’t the enemy. Buyers scan quickly, on a shelf or in a feed, and they need to recognize within a moment what something is before they will consider it. A brand that throws out every convention can end up unrecognized as a candidate at all.

The danger is what happens when category codes make up most of what a brand shows. As Romaniuk put it in an interview with Contagious, distinctiveness means looking like you and not like others. An ad made of category codes looks like everyone. When people do remember it, the memory tends to attach to whichever brand is most familiar in that category, which is usually the leader. You paid for the ad. The leader collected part of the benefit.

That is why the problem is silent. Nothing in a campaign report flags it. The ad tested fine, it looked professional, it was on brief. The loss shows up only as advertising that never seems to build anything, a point a 2013 piece in The Drum made directly: without checking how unique an element is, marketers may be spending money that helps their competitors.

How to find out which codes you actually own

Romaniuk’s method measures each element on two dimensions, which she maps on what she calls the Distinctive Asset Grid. The first is fame: how many category buyers link the element to your brand. The second is uniqueness: how many of them link it only to your brand rather than to competitors too.

Instead of asking people about your brand, you show them the element on its own, with no name attached, and ask which brand comes to mind, as Ritson describes the approach. If most people name you and few name anyone else, you own that code. If many people name several brands, it is shared, and it is doing category work, not brand work.

That sorts your elements into four groups. Codes that are both famous and unique are assets to use everywhere and protect. Codes that are famous but shared are category codes, useful for recognition and useless for memory. Codes that are unique but not yet famous are worth investing in, because consistent use can build their fame. Codes that are neither are clutter.

A formal study is the rigorous version. A cheaper start is Ritson’s suggestion of asking loyal customers which images, details and quirks tell them instantly that something is from your brand, even without the logo.

Break category codes only where you have something to put in their place

The popular advice is to break category codes. The better advice is narrower: keep the category codes buyers need to recognize what you are, and replace the rest with codes that belong to you.

Fanta broke one of the strongest codes in soft drinks, refreshment and sunshine, by making horror the center of its Halloween platform. But it kept its orange, the code people already link to Fanta, and it moved from licensing other people’s horror characters to creating its own, the shift covered in Fanta’s move from borrowed icons to its own. Pepsi took a different route with Share a Pepsi. It stayed inside cola’s codes but changed the claim, from togetherness to taste with food, as we described in what Pepsi’s Coke parody teaches challengers.

Some categories are so heavy with codes that brand codes carry almost all the recall. Perfume advertising shares a familiar grammar of mood, glamour and slow-motion imagery, which is why the bottle and the face matter so much, the pattern unpacked in decoding the tactics of perfume ads. And a brand can deliberately borrow someone else’s codes for a time. A sponsored article on a prestige publisher’s site wears that publisher’s type and layout to borrow its credibility, as covered in the sponsored article is the top of the funnel, not the funnel. Borrowed codes are useful, but they build someone else’s memory unless your own codes travel with them.

Use your codes until you are bored of them, then keep going

Brand codes only work through repetition. A color, character or sound becomes yours by appearing consistently, in the same way, for years, long after the team making the ads has grown tired of it. Brands often lose their codes to their own redesigns rather than to competitors.

That makes codes a management job as much as a creative one. Decide which elements are yours, write down how they are used, and hold every channel to them, from packaging to paid social. Choosing and protecting those assets is the core of brand identity strategy built on assets you own. Codes aren’t only visual, either. A recurring content format, a consistent voice or a signature series can become a code if it appears often enough, which is where content marketing designed around recognizable formats contributes.

Category codes get you considered. Brand codes get you remembered. An ad made only of the first advertises the category, and the category leader thanks you for it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are brand codes?

Brand codes are the elements, other than a brand’s name, that make people think of that brand specifically. They include colors, shapes, logos, characters, sounds, taglines and visual styles. Researchers at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute call them distinctive brand assets. A strong brand code is both widely known among category buyers and linked to one brand only, which is built through consistent use over many years.

What are category codes?

Category codes are the shared conventions of a product category, such as colors, imagery, typography and tone that signal what kind of product something is. They help buyers recognize a category quickly, but because every competitor uses them, they don’t point to any one brand. Advertising built mostly from category codes tends to be remembered as belonging to the most familiar brand in the category.

What is a brand category?

A brand category is the market a brand competes in as buyers see it, such as coffee, running shoes or project management software. Buyers usually think of the category first and then of brands within it. Understanding which codes buyers expect from the category is the starting point for deciding which ones to keep and where a brand can stand out with codes of its own.

How do you measure brand codes?

Show category buyers each element on its own, without the brand name, and ask which brand comes to mind. The share who name your brand measures fame. The share who name only your brand measures uniqueness. Jenni Romaniuk’s Distinctive Asset Grid plots elements on those two dimensions. A quicker, informal start is asking loyal customers what tells them something is from your brand without seeing the logo.