Who is Jenni Romaniuk?

Research professor at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, co-author of How Brands Grow Part 2 and author of Building Distinctive Brand Assets.

What are distinctive brand assets?

Non-name elements — colors, characters, sounds, shapes — that trigger the brand in memory, measured on fame and uniqueness.

What is mental availability?

The probability a brand comes to mind in buying situations — built by linking the brand to category entry points with consistent assets.

Growth Marketing Glossary

Jenni Romaniuk

proper noun

Logos, colors, jingles — she measures which ones actually make buyers think of you, with evidence.

Portrait mark — Jenni Romaniuk

Name: Jenni Romaniuk
Post: Research Professor, Ehrenberg-Bass Institute
Key work: Building Distinctive Brand Assets (2018)
With: Byron Sharp — How Brands Grow Part 2

Forms & parts of speech

Romaniuk · proper noun

Researcher; shorthand for evidence-based branding.

"Run a Romaniuk audit — which assets score high on fame AND uniqueness?"

Who she is, in plain terms

Jenni Romaniuk is a research professor at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science in Adelaide — the lab behind How Brands Grow — and the field's leading authority on distinctive brand assets and mental availability. She co-wrote How Brands Grow Part 2 (2015) with Byron Sharp and wrote Building Distinctive Brand Assets (2018) and Better Brand Health (2023).

The key ideas

Brands grow by being easy to think of (mental availability) and easy to buy (physical availability), so brand building is memory building; distinctive assets — colors, characters, sounds, shapes that trigger the brand name — should be measured on two axes, fame (how many people link the asset to you) and uniqueness (how many link it ONLY to you); category entry points map the buying situations a brand must attach to in memory; and distinctiveness beats differentiation — being recognized matters more than being argued for.

Why she still matters

Her fame-uniqueness grid turned brand identity from a design taste debate into a measurable program — audit assets, pick winners, reach consistency. When a rebrand quietly destroys a famous asset (a color, a character) her framework names the cost in lost mental availability before the sales data delivers the bill.

Worked example. A challenger snack brand wants a redesign. The Romaniuk audit surveys buyers first — the mascot scores 70% fame, 90% uniqueness (a keeper), the wordmark scores low on both (replaceable). The redesign amplifies the mascot across every pack and ad instead of starting fresh. Recognition at shelf holds through the change, and the brand avoids paying to rebuild memory it already owned.

Failure modes to watch. Redesigning away a famous asset because the team is bored of it; chasing differentiation arguments buyers never notice while neglecting recognition; and building assets without measuring fame and uniqueness first.

Synonyms & antonyms

Synonyms

Jenni RomaniukRomaniuk

Origin & history

Marketing science PhD (University of South Australia); career-long researcher at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, where she developed the fame-and-uniqueness measurement of distinctive assets and the category-entry-point framework now standard in brand-health tracking.

Etymology: source.

Usage trends

Search interest for this term over the last five years:

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Common questions

Who is Jenni Romaniuk?: Research professor at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, co-author of How Brands Grow Part 2 and author of Building Distinctive Brand Assets.
What are distinctive brand assets?: Non-name elements — colors, characters, sounds, shapes — that trigger the brand in memory, measured on fame and uniqueness.
What is mental availability?: The probability a brand comes to mind in buying situations — built by linking the brand to category entry points with consistent assets.

Related tools & calculators

toolCAC calculator
toolLTV-to-CAC ratio

Resources & people to follow

bookBuilding Distinctive Brand Assets — Jenni Romaniuk
bookHow Brands Grow Part 2 — Romaniuk & Sharp
referenceEhrenberg-Bass Institute — marketingscience.info

Curated, non-competitor resources verified per term.

Related training

moduleGrowth marketing foundations

Disciplines

Areas of marketing where jenni romaniuk is a core concern:

Content strategyBrand strategy

Sources

trendsGoogle Trends — "jenni romaniuk"