You’ve just reviewed the latest brand tracker. Awareness is high. Your attitudinal metrics are holding steady. Yet your sales are slipping and your market share is in decline. It’s a frustrating place to be, when all the traditional brand health measures say you’re doing fine, but the numbers that matter most are moving in the wrong direction.
So, what’s going on?
This is a moment for clarity. It’s a moment to move beyond surface-level health checks and take a deeper look at whether your brand is mentally available in the moments that matter. Because if your brand isn’t being thought of in buying situations, no matter how well people like or recognise it, then you’re simply not in the race.
When Stable Isn’t Safe…
Many brands find themselves in this exact position. It feels counterintuitive: nothing appears broken, yet something’s clearly off.
One of the first signs is the mismatch between your stable brand scores and a declining sales line. You may have high awareness and good favourability, but if your competitor is being thought of in more buying situations than you, you’re going to lose share. That’s not just a theory; it’s a pattern we’ve seen in our Mental Availability Assessments again and again.
A meaningful metric: Mental Availability
Mental Availability is about your brand’s ability to be recalled in relevant buying situations. Not just in general, but linked to the real-life occasions and cues, called Category Entry Points (CEPs), that people actually use when making decisions.
It’s more than awareness. It’s whether your brand is associated with the reasons, contexts, and needs that trigger purchases. Think: “healthy lunch on the go,” “family weekend treat,” or “fixing a home emergency fast.”
In other words, are you linked to how, why, when, and with whom consumption happens?
Many brands rely on broad or attitudinal metrics and miss the practical reality: if you’re not present in the consumer’s mind when it counts, you’re not going to be chosen.
What You Can Do: Three Steps to Get Back on Track
If your brand health scores are holding steady but your market share is dropping, it’s time to refocus. Here are three practical steps:
1. Run a Mental Availability Assessment
The first step is understanding your current position. A Mental Availability Assessment will help you answer questions like:
- Are there white space CEPs where no brand has Mental Advantage, that are relevant and credible for your brand?
- Are there high-frequency CEPs where few brands compete, giving you an opportunity to win share of mind?
- Are you over-investing in a few CEPs while leaving other opportunities under-supported?
The key metric here is Mental Market Share, the percentage of all links to CEPs your brand holds relative to the competition. It’s a strong predictor of future sales. If your Mental Market Share is below your actual market share, that’s a sign you’re over-performing relative to how often you’re being recalled, probably due to good physical availability, perhaps needing to over invest in retail space, usually unsustainable on its own.
2. Check you are associated with key Buying Situations.
Many brands unintentionally narrow their reach by focusing their marketing efforts on existing buyers or too few consumption occasions.
A better approach is to increase Mental Penetration, that is, ensuring a broader group of people (including non-buyers) can link your brand to at least one relevant buying situation.
Brand leaders often have Mental Penetration of 80% or more. Yet in a review of 166 FMCG brands, we found 50 where less than half of their non-buyers could link them to a single CEP, which will restrict the growth potential of the brand. Our database highlights that there is, on average, less than a 5% chance a brand is bought by a category buyer who cannot link that brand to a single CEP.
3. Realign Investment and Tracking
Your metrics and investment plans must be aligned with Mental Availability principles. Jenni Romaniuk recommends dedicating 60% of brand tracking to Category Entry Points, 30% to other attributes, and only 10% to attitudes. This puts the focus where it counts: how your brand is actually being retrieved in buying moments. This doesn’t mean you have to abandon your existing tracking, there are ways to integrate this approach without causing disruption.
From an investment perspective, minimise ‘non-working spend’ and ensure that your media reinforces CEP associations.
Ask yourself:
- Is your brand linking to the right CEPs in your advertising?
- Are you reinforcing these links with enough media weight?
- Are you targeting category buyers—not just “loyal” customers?
The Payoff
When brands link consistently and meaningfully to a broader set of Category Entry Points, the effect is compounding. You’re remembered in more moments, considered by more people, and chosen more often. That’s the foundation of organic sales growth.
The science here is robust. The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute has repeatedly demonstrated the link between Mental Availability and business performance. And best of all—it’s an approach that is straightforward to explain and implement across an organisation. Simplicity builds belief, especially at board level.
So if your brand health metrics aren’t moving, but your share is falling, don’t wait for another dip to act. Go deeper. Reframe the problem. Focus on Mental Availability. Because it’s not enough to be liked or known. You need to be thought of at the right time, in the right context, by the right people.
Further Reading
Better Brand Health; Jenni Romaniuk.
https://marketingscience.info/better-brand-health
Don’t Let History Hold you Back – How to Enhance Your Brand Health Tracking.
https://smilingcfo.co.uk/mental-availability-and-brand-health-tracking/
