The most underrated brand assets you’re probably ignoring

What’s the last brand interaction that actually made you smile?

Chances are it wasn’t a TV ad or a rebrand announcement, it was probably something much smaller and harder to pin down. A clever bit of copy tucked inside a packaging insert, an unexpectedly funny 404 page, the little sound that plays when you open an app. The kind of thing that makes you pause for half a second and think someone actually thought about this, and then quietly makes you like the brand a little more because of it.

The ta-dum problem

Everyone knows Netflix’s ta-dum: two seconds of audio that somehow manages to evoke comfort, anticipation and familiarity all at once, every single time. Oatly’s carton copy does something similar – genuinely funny, slightly weird, completely distinctive – and so does Monday.com’s confetti animation when you tick something off your list. These things tend to be what people actually remember and talk about, which tells you something important about where brand affinity is really built.

Research from Ipsos and JKR found that only around 15% of brands are truly distinctive, meaning roughly 85% of the £4.5 trillion spent on global marketing each year goes into assets that don’t particularly stand out from one another. That’s a striking figure, and it points less to an issue of resource than a question of whether brands are genuinely thinking about the details that make them recognisable, or just defaulting to what’s expected.

The Financial Times is an instructive case here. Printing on salmon-pink paper was a practical decision as much as a creative one – it turned out to be cheaper than white – and yet it made them instantly recognisable on any newsstand in the world. Distinctiveness, it turns out, has a funny relationship with budget.

Most brands are sitting on more than they think

Walk through the full journey of any customer interaction and you’ll find touchpoints that have been on autopilot for years – confirmation emails written in a tone that bears no resemblance to the brand, loading screens that treat waiting as a neutral experience, invoices and receipts that represent a missed conversation. These everyday moments are encountered far more frequently than most marketing campaigns, and their cumulative effect on how a brand feels to be in contact with is considerable.

There’s something almost editorial about the brands that get this right. Lush puts staff signatures on handmade product labels, turning a functional detail into something that feels personal and considered. Duolingo has built an entire cultural presence around a slightly unhinged green owl, using humour and consistency to make a language-learning app feel genuinely entertaining. Tiffany owns a shade of blue so completely that the box alone carries the full weight of the brand. In each case, the asset is specific, repeatable and deeply embedded in the everyday experience of the brand – which is precisely what makes it so hard to replicate.

The places worth looking

Every brand is different, but there are some consistent spots where the gap between what exists and what’s possible tends to be widest. Transactional messages – order confirmations, form submissions, checkout thank-yous – are an obvious starting point, given how rarely they sound like the brand they’re representing. Error states like 404 pages and failed payment screens are treated as dead ends when they’re actually small, unexpectedly human moments of contact. Onboarding sequences set the tone for everything that follows, and yet they’re often designed as if their only job is to get someone from A to B as efficiently as possible.

Packaging, particularly the parts people discover rather than see immediately – the underside of a box lid, inside a fold, beneath the tissue paper – taps into something genuinely compelling about the feeling of finding rather than being shown. It’s the same instinct that makes Google’s easter eggs work, or the hidden messages some brands bury in their terms and conditions. There’s a particular kind of brand warmth that comes from feeling like you’ve stumbled onto something not everyone notices.

What this actually requires

The starting point isn’t very creative, it’s an audit – a methodical look at every touchpoint in the customer journey and an honest assessment of which ones are doing any real work. From there, the interventions are often simpler than expected: a rewritten email template, a considered bit of copy in an unexpected place, a small animation that makes a routine interaction feel like it was made with some care.

The brands that do this well share a particular quality: they’re paying close attention to the everyday experience they’re creating, and they’re doing so consistently enough that the details accumulate into something that actually feels like a brand. That kind of attention is one of the more durable things to invest in – and, as it happens, one of the harder things for anyone else to copy.