If you are responsible for a brand chasing the leaders, make Mental Penetration a key strategic objective.
Ensuring at least half the Buyers of the Category can link your brand to at least one Category Entry Point is a fundamental step towards building strong Mental Availability.
“Mental Penetration measures how many category buyers have the brand present in memory by identifying whether the brand is recalled for any potential retrieval cue.”
Jenni Romaniuk: Better Brand Health.
These retrieval cues are known as Category Entry Points (CEPs), are brand agnostic, and would exist even if your brand didn’t. As Jenni explains, you can think of them as the mental pathways that link a brand to a buying situation.
KitKat is a great example of a brand that has built a strong association with the Category Entry Point ‘taking a break’.
Strong Mental Availability Leads to Greater Buyer Recruitment
For a brand to grow, it needs to recruit more light and non-buyers, which means increasing the chance of being recalled in a buying situation. Having been retrieved in the memory, the brand must be easy to purchase. In other words, a strong brand will have better Mental Availability and Physical Availability than the competition.
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.
Results in our database show, on average, that there is only a 4% chance that someone unable to make a CEP link to a brand will buy the brand. Yet, for those category buyers able to make a link, on average 32% of them claim to buy that brand.
Identify Growth Opportunities by Benchmarking Against the Category AND Your Competitors.
Brand Leaders often have a Mental Penetration of 80%, with mid-size brands averaging in the region of 50%. What is fascinating is that from a review of 166 FMCG brands, we identified 50 where less than half of all of their non-buyers could link their brand to a single category entry point. Our research continues to identify small and mid-size brands that are trying to build deep relationships with a small number of buyers at the expense of achieving a critical mass who can link the brand to at least one Category Entry Point, i.e. Mental Penetration.
Improve Your Chances of Success
So, given the chances of being bought are significantly improved if your brand’s Mental Penetration score is higher than your competition, it is critical to identify the most valuable category entry points and to understand which brands hold a ‘mental advantage’. This is done most efficiently by carrying out a Mental Availability assessment.
Follow this link to understand how to run your own Mental Availability Assessment, or send us a message, and we will be happy to run it for you.
Further reading:
Better Brand Health, by Prof. Jenni Romaniuk ‘Better Brand Health’
