Our 6 stages to understanding and creating a Mental Availability Assessment.
Whilst a Mental Availability Assessment won’t give you the total picture, you won’t see the whole picture without a) being marketing-orientated and b) working on these 6 stages.
At SmilingCFO, we want to create an environment where every marketer is revered across their organisation for being both brilliant at creativity and for their in-depth knowledge of the science of marketing. With this in mind, we believe every marketer should have access to a Mental Availability Assessment for their brand to be truly market-orientated.
In this article, we are going to walk you through what a Mental Availability Assessment is and how you use the results to inform stronger hypotheses and objectives that ultimately get you to a more compelling brand strategy. So let’s start with the widely accepted premise that brands grow by being ‘easy to think of’ and ‘easy to buy’.
Who is using Mental and Physical Availability?
The idea of Mental and Physical Availability was introduced by The Ehrenberg Bass Institute and is an approach adopted by some of the world’s best brand builders, including Diageo, Coke and McDonalds. Thanks to Professor Jenny Romaniuk, who has written a brilliant book called Better Brand Health, there is a methodology that can be followed to establish the Mental Availability for your brand; “design for the Category, analyse for the Buyer and report for the Brand”.
1. Building your own Mental Availability Assessment
To build your own Mental Availability assessment, you will need four key inputs:
i) The first is you need to know your category buyer, and they’re not necessarily the buyer of your brand.
ii) You need to know the buying situations for the category that you’re researching.
iii) You then need to know what the category entry points are for that specific category. These are the memory retrieval cues or mental pathways that link the buying situations to the brands.
iv) And you will need a representative group of brands, small, medium, and large.
If you’ve run the methodology correctly, you will get a set of mental availability metrics, the umbrella one being Mental Market Share, and the three diagnostic metrics sitting beneath that of Mental Penetration, Network Size, and Share of Mind.
So let’s have a look at the Mental Availability metrics in a little bit more detail. You’ll see them here embedded in our process.
We start with Prompted Brand Awareness before we get to Mental Availability because we want to know if the brand is associated with the correct category.
Then we ask, what is the share of all the links that are made between the category entry points and the brands, (i.e. the Mental Market Share). You can think of this a little bit like your ‘sales market share’, where you’re keen to understand the brand’s share of all the sales in the market. With Mental Market Share, you need to understand the likelihood of the brand being retrieved in a buying situation compared to the competitive set in the category?
You are now at the point where you can use the diagnostic tools to dive deeper into the data, starting with Mental Penetration. This is a key measure because it’s a good step on from Prompted Brand Awareness and tells you how many Category Buyers can link the brand to at least one Category Entry Point (CEP).
Network Size is useful as it identifies the average number of CEPs that are linked to a brand by a Category Buyer. These Category Buyers do not necessarily buy your brand, but they are able to make at least one CEP link to the brand being evaluated.
Share of mind, helps owners of large brands understand how vulnerable they are to competitor incursion. In other words, who is starting to encroach on a brand’s ‘territory’, and what level of ‘cut through’ are they achieving.
2. Which metrics should I focus on initially?
If you are a smaller brand, definitely Prompted Awareness first and then Mental Penetration. For all small and midsize brands, Mental Penetration is a key metric. As your Mental Penetration score gets higher then increasing your focus on Network Size will be important. Remember, brands grow by building wider, fresher networks.
When you have successfully grown your brand to be one of the biggest, then use Share of Mind to keep an eye on your competitive set. Mental Market Share will apply whether you’re a small brand, a medium-sized brand, or a large brand.
The following Premium Lager case study will bring all of these metrics to life for you. We’ve included category buyers from the London area, and the data that you will see is real, but the actual brand has been anonymized.
3. Mental Availability Assessment Methodology
We have found the most effective process is to include Qualitative and Quantitative research, which is in line with Professor Jenny Romaniuk’s recommendations.
The qual. is based on the 7 W’s framework that you will find in the book, Better Brand Health and is a smart and structured way to identify the appropriate memory retrieval cues for each category. By following this process, you will usually arrive at between 20 and 30 Category Entry Points. These then go into quant along with the 15 to 25 brands that are representative of the category you are researching.
In this case study, there were 300 category buyers in our sample. We included 23 of the most relevant category entry points and 19 brands.
Our Quant Research then identified that there were twelve and a half thousand links made between the category entry points and the brands in the research. And for the brand that we’ve identified for this case study, there were 567 links made across those 23 category entry points, which means that its mental market share was 4.6%.
Having followed the methodology, you will arrive at the Snapshot below, which provides a useful overview but becomes more powerful when you view the scores alongside the competitive set.
In the next diagram, the left hand table shows the market leader’s scores. They have a Mental Market share of 9.4% compared to our brand of 4.6%.
Data for another top 5 brands is also shown. Again their Mental Market Share (MMS) score is higher at 8.2%, So our brand has some work to do.
The right-hand table of the same diagram enables us to understand these scores in the context of the overall FMCG market. Interestingly, the top MMS score in our database is 21%. The average score for a category leader is 14%, highlighting how competitive the lager market is.
Another established concept from Ehrenberg Bass is that brands grow by recruiting light and non-buyers. A Mental Availability assessment enables you to highlight the potential of a brand by analysing how easy non-buyers find it to make CEP linkages to a brand. In this case, less than half of the non-buyers of our case study brand could make a single link between a Category Entry Point and the brand.
4. Mental Availability Assessment Advantage Analysis
The final piece of the Mental Availability assessment to share from this case study is the Mental Advantage analysis which shows all of the brand’s comparative strengths and weaknesses when it comes to Category Entry Point association. In the deviation table below, scores of =>+5 and =-5 are highlighted. Brand 10 for example, has a potential Mental Advantage for the CEP ‘catching up with friends’ as no other brand has a higher than +5 score. Our case study brand does not have any positive scores above 3, but there are a number of potential white spaces that could be explored. For example, no brand has a Mental Advantage for the Category Entry Point ‘want to feel relaxed’.
Interestingly, whilst the Brand Leader has a Mental Advantage in two areas, they underachieve on the 3 CEPs highlighted in red. Their job will be to decide if they want to fix these through new brand messaging, or whether they concentrate on strengthening CEPs such as ‘being outdoors’.
5. From Evidence to Hypothesis
All of this data helps us to start to form hypotheses. This is where things get exciting and you see the benefit of investing in the Mental Availability assessment. As you become familiar with the process you will find hypotheses forming in your mind as you go.
A smart tip is to add an extra tab to your workbook and drop in notable pieces of data with an accompanying comment about what might be causing a particular pattern in the data. When you come to the end of your analysis, you will find you have a hypothesis storyboard emerging.
You can then transfer the most relevant evidence into a table similar to the one shown below. So in this instance, with our case study brand, we identified Mental Penetration and Network Size as areas of focus.
Then as we start to think about the hypotheses that might drive future growth, we look at areas such as what’s our reach, our messaging, our branding? What are the competitors doing? How does it fit within an organisation’s full portfolio? Or perhaps there’s even a physical availability challenge that needs addressing. These potential root causes are not intended to be exhaustive, but in our experience, it is notable how many are relevant across multiple category and brand assessments.
For this particular brand, we identified two Mental Penetration hypotheses linked to not reaching enough non-buyers and missing important CEPs
For network size, we identified that the messaging might be too narrow. And actually, other brands in that organisation are sitting in the same CEP spaces.
6. From Hypothesis to Objective Setting
We are now well-placed to write our objectives. We recommend using a GROW, FIX, DEFEND structure to help you be precise about what needs to be achieved. It will make the development of the strategy and briefing agencies much easier.
We are now ready to take all information and start to build a strategic framework like the one illustrated here.
The upper part of the framework navigates you through the steps of the process from Mental Availability assessment to metrics and the bottom arrow reminds you what the output of each stage should achieve and/or feel like. The middle section headlines the 3 most important brand objectives and suggests potential strategies which are then translated into stakeholder briefs.
For example, the intent of the Media Audit would be to identify whether the right level of Reach is being achieved and if not a new brief to the media agency will be submitted. As Byron Sharp says “if I was a CFO I would ask; are you reaching the people who are hard to reach?”
The crux of the Creative Brief would be to ask the agency to create new messaging linked to the new Category Entry Point you are targeting for Mental Advantage.
Our Physical Availability objective actually came from analysing our case study brand’s Mental Market Share (MMS) compared to its Sales Market Share (SMS). MMS and SMS percentages should be similar so because the MMS of our brand was higher than SMS, we were able to identify a Physical Availability opportunity.
As we stated at the start of this article, a Mental Availability assessment won’t provide the whole picture, but it is not possible to see the whole picture without one. In a future blog, we will give guidance on what other analysis we believe you should carry out to complete a Market Orientation exercise, but for now, get started with the Mental Availability assessment. You will be amazed how much rich insight you gather and how seamless it is to flow from data to insight to a marketing strategy your CFO will want to invest in.
SmilingCFO partner Martin Coyle provides a video of this article.
Author Bio: Martin Coyle is a former Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Commercial Officer at a global Bevco, with 30 years experience in FMCG. He is an expert in building Mental and Physical Availability, Portfolio Strategy development and aligning organisations behind brand execution.
Connect with Martin here on LinkedIn
Connect with SmilingCFO partner Mark Smith here on LinkedIn
Take a read of Martin’s next blog on the importance of the CMO and CFO relationship.
If you are operating as a Challenger brand, then click this article where Martin walks you through how to navigate this environment.
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