The Return of the Distinctive Australian Brand

There is something interesting happening in Australian advertising right now. At a time when brands have more ways than ever to target, personalise, optimise and distribute their marketing, some of the most interesting work is doing something rather simpler: reminding people what makes a brand itself.

Red Rooster has just launched a new national brand platform, The Rooster’s Calling, positioning the brand around what it describes as Australia’s heartland by taking a documentary-style approach to the people and places that make up contemporary Australia.

Just weeks ago, COLORBOND steel marked its 60th anniversary with Made by Australia, a campaign built around the brand’s long relationship with Australian life. The work draws on the homes, communities and moments that have made the brand part of the Australian landscape.

Two very different brands. Two very different categories. But both point towards the same strategic question: what does a brand actually own in people’s minds?

Distinctiveness matters more when everything looks the same

For years, marketing has become progressively more sophisticated about reaching people. We can identify audiences with extraordinary precision, tailor messages to increasingly specific groups and optimise campaigns in real time. The machinery of marketing has become more efficient, but efficiency does not necessarily make a brand more memorable.

In fact, it can do the opposite.

When every brand can personalise its communications, produce endless content and appear in precisely the right place at precisely the right time, the things that cannot be easily replicated become more valuable. A recognisable point of view. A distinctive voice. A visual world. A piece of music. A particular way of behaving. A story that people instinctively associate with one brand rather than another.

These are the assets that build memory.

And memory is still one of the most valuable things a brand can own.

Australian brands have an advantage. If they know how to use it.

There is something particularly interesting about the Australian context. We have a strong cultural identity, but Australian brands operate in a market crowded with global competitors. In category after category, local brands are competing for attention with businesses that have enormous international scale and marketing budgets.

Being Australian, therefore, is not in itself a strategy.

Putting a Southern Cross in an ad, casting a few recognisable Australian faces or adding a familiar soundtrack does not automatically make a brand distinctive. Cultural relevance has to be earned. The brand needs a credible relationship with the thing it is claiming.

That is where the COLORBOND steel work is particularly interesting. Sixty years gives the brand something many newer brands would struggle to manufacture: history. The campaign is not simply saying that COLORBOND steel is Australian. It is using decades of presence in Australian homes, buildings, communities and memories to demonstrate why that association exists in the first place.

Red Rooster is taking a different route. Rather than leaning primarily on heritage, its new platform looks at the people and places that make up what it calls Australia’s heartland. The result is an attempt to make the brand feel culturally familiar and recognisably its own, rather than simply another fast-food player competing on product, price and promotion.

Neither approach is about being Australian for the sake of it. The interesting part is finding the piece of Australian culture that the brand has a legitimate right to own.

A brand platform needs more than a campaign

This is where the distinction between a campaign and a brand platform becomes important.

A campaign can create attention. A platform gives that attention somewhere to go.

The strongest brand platforms provide a simple organising idea that can stretch across communications, experiences, channels and, ideally, the behaviour of the business itself. They give creative teams somewhere to go without forcing every execution to look or sound the same.

That is particularly important now, because brands are producing more communications across more touchpoints than ever. Without a strong underlying idea, integration can quickly become little more than a collection of assets.

The answer is not more consistency for its own sake. It is coherence.

People do not need every piece of brand communication to look identical. They need to be able to recognise the same brand thinking underneath it.

That is a harder creative challenge, and a more valuable one.

The danger of confusing relevance with distinctiveness

There is a temptation in modern marketing to chase whatever people are talking about now. Brands want to be culturally relevant, to participate in conversations, to respond quickly and to make content that feels native to the moment.

All of that can be useful. But relevance without distinctiveness is easily forgotten.

A brand can make a very good piece of content that everyone agrees is timely, entertaining and appropriate, only for nobody to remember who made it.

That is one of the great paradoxes of contemporary advertising. The closer brands get to behaving like everyone else in culture, the harder it becomes to remember which brand was actually there.

Distinctive brands play a different game. They participate in culture, but they bring something recognisably their own to it.

That might be a particular tone of voice, a character, a visual device, a point of view or simply an unusual way of looking at the world. The execution can change. The underlying idea remains.

The real value of a brand is what competitors cannot copy

This is why brand strategy and creative strategy still matter, perhaps more than ever.

The tools available to marketers are becoming increasingly democratised. Media platforms are accessible. Production is faster. Targeting is more sophisticated. Content can be created at scale.

The harder thing to replicate is a genuinely distinctive brand.

Competitors can copy your channel strategy. They can respond to your promotion. They can adopt a similar format. They can even borrow elements of your visual language.

What they cannot easily copy is a brand that has built a deep and credible association in people’s minds over time.

That is the real value of distinctiveness.

It is not about being different for the sake of being different. It is about making choices that are recognisably yours, then having the discipline to build them over time.

The next era of brand building may be about doing less, better

Perhaps the lesson from these recent Australian campaigns is not that every brand needs a big national idea. It is that brands need to be clearer about what is worth building.

In a marketing environment increasingly obsessed with optimisation, there is a strong case for doing fewer things with greater consistency. Fewer messages, but stronger ones. Fewer campaigns, but more connected thinking. Fewer attempts to borrow relevance, and more investment in creating something that people can associate with the brand.

Because ultimately, a brand does not become distinctive because it says something once.

It becomes distinctive because it says, shows and does something recognisable again and again, until the association becomes instinctive.

The opportunity for Australian brands is significant. We have plenty of cultural material to draw from, plenty of brands with genuine histories and plenty of audiences who can tell the difference between something that feels authentic and something that is simply trying to look Australian.

The smartest brands will know the difference too.

They will not ask, “What can we say that is relevant right now?”

They will ask a more difficult and more useful question:

“What can we say that only we could say?”

That is where distinctiveness starts. And in an increasingly crowded marketing landscape, it may be one of the most valuable things a brand can own.