“If I had a nickel.…”

No good story ever comes from that start.

But, seriously, if I had a nickel for every time I heard a charity brand talk about what makes them unique and then sit through a rattling off of a completely undifferentiated list of programmatic focus areas – e.g. we help women, we are there after the emergency – I’d have at least a whole $1.00.

Differentiated brands are uncommon and importantly, not necessary for success.

Differentiation means having a unique benefit or reason to donate to your charity.  The number of charities continues to grow faster than GDP,  giving , and these days, inflation.  There is little to no barrier to entry and no significant mergers & acquisitions activity.  This means we’ve arguably got way too many charities doing the same job which fosters little to no differentiation in many categories.

But what then leads a donor to chose one international relief group or conservation group over another?

Distinctiveness is or better, could be, a key.  This is a brand looking like itself but with some brand asset other than the logo and mark.

Distinctiveness could be as simple a a color, chartreuse or blue.  If you use that color consistently and creatively then it helps make you stand out.  It becomes another mental shortcut to be seen.

This is about being memorable.  There is a shed load of evidence that brand building is really about being salient or remembered.  This doesn’t require doing anything substantively different or better than the competition.  Just being loaded into the memory banks in some soft, distant way matters a lot to the donate decision.

Corporate brands are famous for building distinct assets.

• Kellogs and Tony the Tiger
• The Aflac Duck
• The Geico, gecko
• Budweiser with too many to list (e.g., Clydesdales)

Heck, MasterCard is creating a sonic identity with an auditory logo to help consumers suffering with visual overload.

A sobering note on the quest for differentiation:

Apple is synonymous with innovation and design yet 77% of its user base don’t see it as different or unique from other brands.

And the case for distinct?

A meta analysis of 2,000 videos found less than 50% used a distinctive brand asset other than logo and color.  But, of those that did, their creative scored 34% more recall.

Another study found brands with distinct assets are 52% more salient than their rivals.

Be distinct first.  Different is over-rated.

Kevin