Ownable Assets
Cover the names on five budgeting apps and most of them turn into the same app: the same white card, the same blue button, the same rounded corners. Each team chose those values for good reasons. None of the values belongs to any of them.
Pick two or three things nobody else in your category uses (a shape, a color pairing, a way of drawing progress or setting numbers) and use them the same way on every screen, because people recognize what is both unique and repeated.
Four budgeting apps. Look at each one, then take the names off.
Look at the four apps, then take the names off and identify each one from a screen you haven't seen. Do it with the category defaults, then with each app's own assets.
What the brand research found
Brand researchers call these distinctive assets: the colors, shapes, characters and type that bring a brand to mind without its name. Jenni Romaniuk of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute sets out two tests. An asset has to be famous (people know it) and unique (it brings to mind only one brand), and "of these two, uniqueness is most important." She also calls inconsistency "the enemy of distinctive asset building." An asset that changes from one place to the next never gets learned.
Some kinds of asset are much harder to own than others. Ipsos and the agency JKR tested over 5,000 assets with over 26,000 people and graded how well each one brought its brand to mind on its own. Only 15% reached the top tier. By type, 31% of products made it, 19% of logos, 16% of characters, 6% of slogans, and 4% of colors. A 2024 study of UK car brands found the same pattern: fonts, slogans and colors scored low on uniqueness, and logos were the most ownable.
So a brand color alone rarely does the job, because a color is easy to share with half the category. A pairing does better, or a shape, or a character, or a color that always appears with a particular shape. Mastercard is the well-known case: in its own research, 81% of people recognized the two circles without the name. That is a case study, from the brand's side.
Applying it to interfaces
This research is about ads, packaging and logos, not product screens. Applying it to UI is our extrapolation, and it hasn't been tested there. The reasoning carries over to a product people use often: every screen is another chance to repeat an asset, or to break it.
In an interface, an asset might be a shape that shows up in buttons, progress and empty states. It might be a color pairing, a way of setting numbers, a way of drawing progress, or a sound. A typeface alone is weak, for the same reason a color is: many brands can use it. In the demo each app has two or three: Tally counts in tally marks and sets money in a mono face, Kitty draws everything as a round pot, Stash puts an envelope flap on every screen, and Fathom reads progress off a depth gauge. None of them changed the layout.
Pick assets that come from the subject (Borrow From the Subject), since those are least likely to be shared. Before adopting one, check the category. Julian Major's advice is to "check if any competitors have associations with it." Then put the assets in tokens and components, so a new screen gets them by default instead of by memory. Spend them where people pause, as in Signature Move, and keep frequent controls quiet (Novelty Budget).
Why you can't judge your own
The people who make a brand are the worst at telling how distinctive it is. Ehrenberg-Bass found that marketers overestimate how well known their assets are and underestimate how distinctive they are, because they see far more of their category than their customers do.
So test it the way the demo does. Show someone outside the team a screen with the name removed and ask whose it is. If they can't tell, the assets aren't unique yet, or they aren't repeated enough to be learned. Changing them for variety would only make that worse.
Resources
Brands of Distinction - Jenni Romaniuk of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute on distinctive assets, why uniqueness matters more than fame, and why inconsistency undoes both.
Only 15% of brand assets are "truly distinctive", study finds - Ipsos and JKR tested over 5,000 assets with over 26,000 people. Products and logos reached the top tier most often, colors least.
Exploring the uniqueness of distinctive brand assets within the UK automotive industry - Fiocchi and Seyed Esfahani, 2024. Fonts, slogans and colors scored low on uniqueness; logos were the most ownable.
Five tips for identifying and managing your brand assets - Check what competitors already own before you adopt an element, and don't change it from campaign to campaign.
Mastercard, by Pentagram - The case for dropping the name from the mark, after 81% of people recognized the circles alone.