Is it really a distinctive asset if nobody ever retells it?

The classic test of a distinctive asset from Ehrenberg-Bass is two numbers: Fame, or how many category buyers link it to the brand, and Uniqueness, or how many link it to that brand alone.

Now that we live in a world where brand meaning gets made mostly by others, I keep wondering whether that stool needs a third leg, about whether anyone picks up that distinctive asset and passes it on.

La Roche-Posay has what the old me would have called a great distinctive asset. On the site, on the PDPs, in retailer copy: recommended by 90,000 dermatologists worldwide, attributed to an IQVIA survey. Specific, sourced, and nobody else can print it.

A Dermstore page for La Roche-Posay with the line "Recommended by 90,000 dermatologists worldwide" underlined in rust. The number is prominent.

I ran the Retellability Test on the sunscreen category, expecting that asset to do real work for La Roche-Posay. In what I could find, it isn’t.

People clearly link the brand to dermatologists. No problem there. A Reddit poster last February, for example, named La Roche-Posay as one of the brands dermatologists recommend most. In the same breath, however, she also named CeraVe, Cetaphil, and Vanicream.

That’s a Uniqueness problem, and the classic test catches it just fine. One association shared among four brands named means the asset is not particularly unique to any of the brands.

Here’s what the classic test misses, though. That poster, and others I found, didn’t talk at all about the 90,000 number or the survey, which are the parts that belong only to La Roche-Posay and could have, in a different world, been the thing that separated the brand from its competitors. People like this poster get the gist, that “derms recommend it,” and post that instead. As a result, the brand starts to sound like all their competitors.

What’s interesting is that La Roche-Posay already knows how to do distinctive assets well. Their product and ingredient names (Anthelios, Cicaplast, Effaclar, UVMune 400) are invented words, and are reproduced successfully and exactly by dermatologists, retailers, machines and people teaching each other about it.

A three-column test for a distinctive asset. Fame and Uniqueness are aided recall; Retold is read from public record. The 90,000 dermatologists claim is checked on Fame and Uniqueness and open on Retold. Anthelios is checked on all three.

Here’s an exercise to try. Let me know how it works for you. You probably already have either data or an educated guess about the Fame and Uniqueness of your distinctive assets. Add a third column: Are those assets retold? It’s a matter of record, right there in public view, and you can go and read it.

And you can also read the full test of La Roche-Posay here.