This article intends to show how the concepts of ‘Demand Spaces’ and ‘Mental Availability’ can combine to build more effective marketing strategies.
If you are a global brand leader using a Demand Space model, I show how your portfolio strategy can have more meaning to the wider organisation by incorporating Category Entry Points.
If you are a ‘local’ brand leader, then I provide examples showing how Demand Spaces and Mental Availability can work in harmony to provide clear communication and activation briefs to your agencies.
The two things that prompted me to write this article:
i) LinkedIn can be an incredible learning tool, but I feel my energy draining when I see one concept being dismissed to create space for a new concept.
It is in our nature to nurture, to take care of and to help someone or something develop, yet for some reason, in the world of marketing, the instinct seems to be to contradict, disprove or dismiss a concept rather than channelling our energy into thinking how it can be applied or combined with other concepts in the pursuit of a better outcome.
ii) We have clients curious to understand how ‘Consumer Growth / Demand Spaces’ can combine with the concepts of Mental Availability to optimise ‘local growth strategies’
So in the spirit of sharing lessons that move us all forward, this article reflects my experiences working with Demand Spaces and Mental Availability in the hope it helps enhance your marketing strategy.
Let us Start with a Brief Overview of Each Concept:
Demand Spaces:
“The biggest determinant of consumer choice is the occasion of use” – Rocket: 8 lessons to secure infinite growth, Boston Consulting Group.
Demand Spaces is the general term given to concepts such as ‘Demand Centric Growth’ (from BCG) and is concerned with understanding consumer demand, based on consumer’s emotional and functional needs. The approach is less concerned with demographics and more focused on the motivations and occasions of purchase.
The benefits of ‘Demand Space’ models, particularly for global brand marketers with a portfolio to manage across multiple countries, are;
- The Model provides an understanding of what drives consumer choice and where the biggest opportunities might lie.
- It maps the portfolio to these opportunities to avoid brands targeting the same spaces.
- Informs innovation opportunities.
The output is also intended to influence communication and activation, but in my experience, sometimes it is hard to extract outputs that are meaningful at a ‘local’ level.
This is where applying the principles of Mental Availability can help.
Mental Availability:
“The single most important factor driving brand preference is Mental Availability” ‘How not to Plan’, Binet & Carter
Mental Availability is a brand’s propensity to be thought of in buying situations and, as evidenced by The Ehrenberg Bass Institute, is a critical component of growth, alongside Physical Availability. In other words, brands grow by being easy to think of and easy to purchase.
The benefits of building Mental Availability are;
- In a marketing world of contradictions and disputes, you can take confidence in the fact that Mental Availability is a concept that is widely accepted by marketing thought leaders and large organisations alike. Ehrenberg Bass has extensive empirical evidence showing that Mental Availability is a major contributing factor when assessing the success of brands. Indeed we see this replicated in SmilingCFO UK FMCG database.
- The strong correlations between Mental Availability metrics and business performance metrics reassure the CFO.
- Understanding the key metrics of Mental Availability and their relative importance depending on brand size funnels you toward clear strategic objectives that the organisation can align behind.
If you allow me to oversimplify for a moment, you can think about Demand Spaces as ‘understanding category choice’ and Mental Availability as ‘improving the chance of a brand being chosen’. You will see in the table below that there is some overlap, but having worked with both, I believe them to be complementary.
The Demand Space approach aids understanding of the category, and the potential size of the opportunity and avoids targeting too tightly.
It was always an enjoyable experience to present the outputs of a Demand Space project to a global C-Suite because the ‘size of the prize’ always grabbed attention. However, these seductive headlines tended to have less meaning when presented to regional business units.
Roger Martin, as part of his ‘Playing to Win’ series published a compelling article entitled ‘Why you should be afraid of great execution’. In it, he warns of the dangers of strategies that leave execution open to interpretation and urges us to “ensure that great strategy choices flow from the C-Suite to the front line.”
In my previous role as a Chief Commercial Officer, responsible for marketing and sales, it was incumbent on me to ensure Demand Space strategies made sense and that the appropriate actions flowed through the commercial teams and ultimately translated to meaningful propositions for our customers.
To do this successfully, I needed to overcome the following:
- Whilst the Demand Space work generates a consistent language internally, it is not a common language with customers. In fact, in an FMCG world, retail buyers are presented with multiple iterations of ‘growth spaces’ that cannot be applied to a shelf fixture.
- The size of prize numbers can often be so significant that they lose credibility in a marketing presentation to Sales and, in turn, a sales presentation to a Customer.
- The growth opportunities identified aren’t always the ones that excite us as marketers. For example, in the world of beer, the biggest opportunities across territories tend to be ‘low energy’ occasions, and whilst these are valuable financially, engaging storytelling linked to these occasions can present creative challenges.
Incorporating Mental Availability theory alongside Demand Spaces was key to overcoming these challenges.
Revisiting the table above, you will note that Demand Spaces highlights the most attractive spaces from the perspective of both the individual brands and the overall portfolio so the company can make the logical choice about where to compete. Whereas Mental Availability highlights the most attractive category entry points, for individual brands, to increase the chance of being thought of in buying situations AND the likelihood of being purchased.
If Mental Availability is the likelihood of a brand being thought of in a buying situation, then the job of a marketer is to increase the chance of the brand being thought of in many buying situations.
To know how to do this, you need to understand the measures of Mental Availability. I go into much more detail in my blog ‘Mental Availability Assessment and its importance to Market Orientation.
Translating theory into practice:
“In most buying situations, people want to move quickly and easily from generating a category need to satisfying this need” ‘Better Brand Health’ Romaniuk 2023
Understanding the memory retrieval cues, (category entry points), that link brands to buying situations is key.
Knowing the Category Entry Points
Understanding the CEPs for the category your brand(s) operate in will enable you to translate the theory into performance by mapping the likelihood of being recalled in the buying situations defined by the Demand Space opportunities.
In this example, the category entry point identified that links to the Demand Space is ‘dinner party gift’ and the occasion ‘dinner with friends’ The opportunity for a brand now becomes more granular, moving beyond targeting the ‘impress others’ space to having an objective to build brand memories associated with a dinner party gift. This is something that can be applied to both a communication brief and an activation brief. A full mental availability assessment also reveals which CEPs are the most important for the particular category and which ones offer the greatest opportunity for your brand.
Category Buyers who can make at least one link to a brand, (that is to say they contribute to the Mental Penetration score), are significantly more likely to buy the brand than category buyers unable to make a single link. It is, therefore, possible to forecast the uplift in market share based on projected improvements in the Mental Penetration score.
The ability to have a meaningful metric in an organisation that can link across functions is immensely powerful.
We know that, ultimately, brands grow by building wider, fresher (memory) networks. In our database, the average Network Size for a category leader is 7. Using Demand Spaces and Mental Availability together enables us to map the most appropriate CEPs for the brand and develop the strategies to build associations over time, (illustrated below).
Key takeaway messages.
The concepts of Demand Spaces and Mental Availability complement each other.
If you are a brand leader responsible for global strategies using a Demand Space model, then don’t leave the local teams to figure out the execution, but instead, use the principles of Mental Availability to make the portfolio strategy more meaningful at the front end of the organisation.
If you are a local brand leader, then I hope you are encouraged by the examples provided showing how Demand Spaces and Mental Availability can work in harmony to provide clear communication and activation briefs to your agencies.
Whatever your brand remit, you have the opportunity to set meaningful targets, such as Mental Penetration growth, and translate them into commercial metrics that excite all your stakeholders, both internal and external.
Martin Coyle
Partner – SmilingCFO
Former Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Commercial Officer at global Bevco, Molson Coors.
He is an expert in building Mental and Physical Availability, Portfolio Strategy development and aligning organisations behind brand execution.
Credits:
Boston Consulting Group for their online contributions to Demand Centric Growth.
The Ehrenberg Bass Institute for their scientific approach to identifying the growth laws of marketing.
Recommended reading:
Better Brand Health – Prof Jenni Romaniuk 2023
