What makes a retail brand truly unforgettable?

Marketing spend should compound, but if your brand assets are weak, your advertising investment might be boosting your competitors. 

Australian retailers are among the country’s biggest advertisers. Every year they compete through a relentless calendar of retail moments: Back to School, EOFY, Click Frenzy, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Boxing Day and countless tactical campaigns in between. According to Nielsen Ad Intel, retailers spent more than $2.3 billion on advertising in 2025, making it Australia’s largest advertising category. The biggest spender on the list? Harvey Norman.

Retailers understand the value of marketing because few industries rely more heavily on staying top of mind. They also understand efficiency. They optimise supply chains, reduce shrinkage, improve fulfilment and streamline operations because they know small improvements compound into significant commercial gains. Marketing deserves the same mindset.

For decades, marketing efficiency has been measured through reach, frequency and return on investment. All important metrics. But there is another question worth asking: is every marketing dollar strengthening your brand, or someone else’s?

The strongest retail brands understand that marketing should compound. Every social post, catalogue, retail media placement, package, store experience and television campaign should leave the brand stronger than it was before. Every impression should reinforce the same memory structures so that the next impression works a little harder. And that has never been more important.

Consumers no longer experience brands through complete campaigns. They encounter fragments: an Instagram reel, a retail media placement, an app notification, a package on a shelf, a catalogue or a storefront. Recognition now happens in milliseconds, or it doesn’t happen at all.

At the same time, retail branding is converging. Rounded typography, minimal logos, friendly illustrations and lifestyle photography dominate the category. Brands increasingly look contemporary, but less like themselves. We’ve confused modern with memorable.

This is why distinctive brand assets have become one of retail’s most valuable commercial advantages. Colours, symbols, typography, characters, packaging, language and retail environments help customers recognise a brand instantly. They don’t simply attract attention. They make attention more productive.

That was the thinking behind Make It Unmistakable, a study conducted by research firm The Navigators and branding agency Principals. It measured more than 120 distinctive brand assets across Australia’s biggest brands. But rather than asking whether people recognised an asset, the study measured whether they correctly attributed it to the intended brand. And that distinction matters.

Every time someone notices your advertising but mistakes it for a competitor, part of your marketing investment is lost. Every execution that looks like the category rather than your brand is a missed opportunity to strengthen memory.

Even a modest improvement in how effectively advertising reinforces the correct brand represents enormous value. Across Australia’s $2.3 billion annual retail media investment, a five per cent improvement equates to around $115 million in more productive marketing. At 10 per cent, it’s more than $230 million. These are illustrative scenarios, but they highlight the scale of the opportunity.

One of the clearest findings from the study was that Australia’s strongest retailers don’t rely on a single logo or slogan. They build connected systems.

Bunnings is the benchmark. Its green and red colour palette, warehouse environment, apron, sausage sizzle, price promise and bold typography all reinforce the same idea. Customers rarely experience every asset at once, yet almost any combination points back to the brand.

Officeworks tells a similar story. Rather than relying on a single hero asset, the OW monogram, blue-and-red colour system, catalogue architecture and Make Bigger Things Happen device work together to create multiple routes back to the brand. The result is one of Australia’s strongest retail identity systems.

Perhaps the most revealing finding came from Harvey Norman.

Despite being Australia’s biggest advertiser, it was one of the weakest-performing retail identity systems in the study. Its strongest asset, the familiar Go Harvey Go theme, ranked just 52nd overall with a Distinctiveness Score of 0.30. The Big TV Sale typography ranked 94th, the blue, white and burgundy colour system ranked 110th, and its catalogue page ranked 118th out of the 121 assets tested.

The lesson isn’t that Harvey Norman doesn’t advertise enough, quite the opposite. It demonstrates that media weight and brand strength are not the same thing. One buys attention; the other builds memory.

This is where the marketing effectiveness conversation needs to evolve.

For years we’ve focused on capturing attention. But attention only creates long-term value when people recognise who it’s for.

The retailers that grow most effectively aren’t simply the ones people notice. They’re the ones people recognise instantly and attribute correctly. Every campaign reinforces the next. Every asset strengthens the system. Every media dollar works a little harder than the last.

Retailers have spent decades mastering operational efficiency. The next competitive advantage is marketing that builds a brand that makes every marketing dollar easier to recognise, harder to confuse and more valuable over time.

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This article first appeared in Inside Retail.

Charlie Rose is Strategy Director at Principals. 

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