Key takeaways
- Mental availability is a practical growth lever.
- Brands lose out when they under-invest in building memory retrieval across multiple buying situations.
- Focus and consistency produce meaningful improvement over time.
Brands grow because people think of them, in the right moments.
If you work in marketing, you’ve probably felt it: the endless swirl of opinions on how to grow a brand. One minute it’s all about standing for something bigger than yourself. The next it’s about being radically different. Somewhere in there, you still have to hit targets and justify the budget.
So it’s no wonder that sometimes, the simplest truths get lost in the noise. Brands grow because people think of them, in the right moments.
As Mark Ritson recently said on the CMO Podcast, “…I think what you’re seeing in Europe, in Australia, in other parts of the world now is a different, newer school that focuses on salience, on that being 70% 80% 90% of the job. It’s distinctiveness over differentiation, where purpose doesn’t really have much of a role to play…”, in other words, by being mentally available.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/Ritson CMO Podcast
What Does ‘Mental Availability’ Really Mean?
At its heart, Mental Availability is simple. It measures how likely it is that someone recalls your brand in a specific buying situation. Not when they are responding to a general awareness question or scrolling social feeds but when they actually enter the category. Ehrenberg-Bass Institute call the triggers that spark this recall Category Entry Points (CEPs). These are the real-life situations that make someone reach for a coffee, pick up a snack, or call an insurance provider.
Linking your brand clearly to the right moments and co-presenting your brand’s distinctive assets in the right situational context, increases the chance of being chosen. This doesn’t have to be complicated, you just need to understand the following;
What are the real moments, (buying situations), when people enter the category?
Do buyers recall the brand in multiple buying situations?
Are we measuring whether we’re getting easier to recall in the most valuable buying situations?
You don’t need to fix everything at once. Just knowing where you stand can help you focus on what to strengthen next. If you have 5 minutes now, then why not take our Mental Availability Review. It will help you assess how well placed your brand and organisation is to win the Mental Availability battle.
Stacking the odds in your favour.
Mapping Readiness: Identifying and prioritising key buying situations
It’s crucial to remember that people don’t think about brands in isolation. As Dale Harrison explains, “No humans suddenly have brand names pop into their heads as isolated thoughts… it’s ALL triggered recall.” This is why brands should build mental shortcuts linked to clear contexts. Understanding the context and then mapping which triggers (CEPs) matter most is a crucial step to building Mental Availability.
An effective mapping process should identify those CEPs already strongly associated with your brand and where your competitors have a mental advantage. More often than not appropriate ‘white spaces’ can be identified and added to a range of target CEPs.
Activation Effectiveness: Is the brand building associations with the target CEPs?
Build CEPs into your creative development workflow, ensuring everyone is familiar with the concept of Mental Availability and the importance of category entry points. This is not about restricting creative agencies, but instead liberating them with an open-ended brief with the clear objective to link the brand to the most valuable buying situations whilst conveying your intended brand image. For example, McDonald’s wants you to think “fast, easy meal” at the moment you get hungry on the go. Red Bull consistently links itself to “energy boost” moments. Great brands don’t overcomplicate this. They hammer home simple, consistent cues: colours, jingles, slogans, taglines. Over time, these build strong memory structures in people’s minds.
When collaborating with your media agency, broad reach is the priority. Most brands make most of their money from people who buy them only occasionally, and who happily buy other brands too. Ehrenberg-Bass has shown us that profitable growth comes from heavy category buyers with large repertoires.
That is not to say that you shouldn’t combine this objective with segmented targeting, tailoring specific CEP messages for key buying moments.
Measurement Maturity: Tracking and learning from your Mental Availability efforts
The first step is to run a Mental Availability Assessment to understand your brand’s current position and how likely it is to be thought of in buying situations. It will also help you identify the most common CEPs used in the category. The goal is to create a baseline view of how mentally available your brand is and where the gaps and opportunities lie.
Request a Mental Availability Assessment Demo
Building a Shared Understanding Across Teams
One of the biggest advantages of focusing on Mental Availability is that it gives everyone, from marketers and agencies to sales teams and finance, a clear shared goal to rally around. It shifts the conversation from abstract brand values to the practical moments that actually influence purchase decisions.
When everyone understands which buying situations matter most, it becomes much easier to align creative ideas, media planning, and in-store execution around a few consistent cues. It also helps teams make smarter decisions about where to spend time, energy and money. With a clear map of priority Category Entry Points, there’s less debate over which channels to back, which messages to prioritise, and which opportunities are worth testing. This clarity reduces internal friction and helps keep plans realistic and grounded in how people actually buy.
Sales teams benefit too. Knowing which moments matter most helps them tailor conversations with retailers, align promotions and in-store displays, and ensure that the brand shows up consistently at the shelf or point of service. Over time, these joined-up efforts strengthen the mental shortcuts that make the brand easier to choose, even in a crowded market.
All of this makes for better marketing, with clearer communication and stronger links between brand spend and commercial outcomes, which is exactly what your CFO needs to see.
Building Mental Availability does require upfront investment. It takes consistent media spend, distinctive brand assets, and clear, repeatable creative. But from a CFO’s perspective, this is money well spent because it directly supports predictable growth. The CFO doesn’t want to control creative work, but they do expect marketing plans to show how the brand connects to the key buying moments that drive sales.
Final Thoughts
Mental Availability is a practical way to stack the odds in your favour, giving your brand a better chance to be noticed and chosen when it really matters.
If there’s one thing to take away, it’s this: keep reminding people you exist by building brand associations with multiple high value buying situations.
