It is encouraging to see so much written about the importance of Mental Availability, particularly as a guiding principle for brand investment. Knowing when to take the step to widen your messaging, known as Network Size, is critical.
“Mental Availability creates persistent, incremental sales outcomes, and this asset should be carefully maintained by marketers”
Billy Ryan, Head of Marketing Analytics, 7Stars
Less is written about the diagnostic metrics that form Mental Availability.
In our series of ‘quick reads’ we have been diving deeper into these measures, guiding brand leaders on what to look for and what to fix in order to maximise the chance of their brand being thought of in as many buying situations as possible.
Today, we focus on Network Size as a Component of Increasing Mental Availability.
“brands grow by building wider, fresher networks in a buyer’s memory”.
Jenni Romaniuk
For a longer read, check out Prof Romaniuk’s brilliant book, ‘Better Brand Health’.
In our SmilingCFO database, the leading brands generally have a Network Size score ranging from 5 to 10. This means a category buyer can make between 5 and 10 Category Entry Point links to a brand. As a quick reminder, Category entry points (CEPs) are the retrieval cues or “mental pathways” a buyer uses to recall brands in buying situations.
Our data shows that in all but one category, the top 3 brands have the highest Network Size scores, so growing this metric is clearly important. However, it isn’t the primary objective for those brands with a low Mental Penetration (MPen) score. The reason is highlighted in the chart below.
Skinny Cracker Co. has a very high Network Size score amongst those who buy the brand, but the Mental Penetration of the brand is very low. The small bubble indicates that the number of non-buyers able to link CEPs to the brand is also low.
In this situation, a valid growth hypothesis would be to reduce the investments that reach existing buyers and instead broaden reach with messaging to non-buyers. This would improve Mental Penetration and Network Size: two of the key metrics that underpin Mental Availability.
When we change the vertical axis to include buyers and non-buyers, you can see a more accurate view of the brand’s Mental Availability.
The point is not to call out Skinny Cracker specifically. We see this pattern across most of the categories in our database. Sometimes it is because the brand is so new and physical availability is still being built, but it can also be because the brand is overly focussed on loyalty rather than recruitment.
Clearly, the bigger brands have greater resources, but there is still much to be hopeful for as a brand on the left of this chart, and we would recommend the following steps:
- Ensure the most important Category Entry Points are identified and you understand which ones are ‘unclaimed’ spaces.
- Then decide which CEP to lead with in terms of messaging. Reach as many buyers of the category as you can afford with this message.
- Don’t spend the budget in one burst, try and spread it evenly across the year.
This approach should increase the Mental Penetration score.
Once you start to see Mental Penetration improvement, it could be time to widen the messaging (increase your Network Size), by including more CEPs in the communication plan.
If you would like to understand where your brand sits, hit the ‘contact us’ button as we may have your category and brand in our database.
In the meantime, you might find this quick read on Mental Penetration useful.
