How to Improve Your Brand's Mental Availability

Understanding how likely your brand is to be thought of in a buying situation is a smart starting point for any brand strategy. Improving the brand’s mental availability is what the business requires for growth to happen.

Therefore, a key role for any marketer is to ensure the brand is easily thought of in as many buying situations as possible. 

Strengthen the brand’s links to these buying situations in the memory of the category buyer and you will improve your brand’s mental availability.   Do that and you increase your chance of converting a buyer of the category to become a buyer of your brand.  

Remember:

So before you start your next round of brand planning, we highly recommend you get the Mental Availability score for your brand.

You will need four key inputs to improve your brand’s Mental Availability:

• You need to know who buys the category, and they’re not necessarily buyers of your brand.
• You need to know the relevant buying situations for the category.
• You then need to know what the category entry points are for that specific category. These are the memory retrieval cues or mental pathways that link the buying situations to the brands.
• You will need a representative group of brands, small, medium, and large.

If you want to understand more about how to run this process yourself, check out our video, or if you are short of time, message us as your brand might already be in our database.

However, if you choose to get hold of your Mental Availability score, the first thing to review is where your brand ranks relative to the competitive set.

In the Gin Category example below, you can see that there are 3 brands clearly ahead of the rest.  These brands have higher Mental Market Share scores, which means they are associated with more category entry points than the rest.  Often, these leaders need to track ‘share of mind’ as an early warning system for spotting competitor incursion (more of this in a future article).

The brands in the middle will need to improve their Mental Penetration score, i.e. they need to increase the number of category buyers who can link them to at least one category entry point (CEP).  Our database clearly shows that category buyers are significantly more likely to buy a brand if they can link it to a CEP.

A brand like Opihr is probably at the stage where Mental Penetration (MPen) should be the primary focus, whereas Hendrick’s needs to improve MPen and Network Size.  That means being associated with a wider range of CEPs, particularly amongst their non-buyers.

The second area of review should be the level of importance of each CEP, as in our experience the data always shows that some category entry points are more important than others. So whilst it is beneficial to try and identify a CEP that has no dominant associations to a competitor brand, knowing whether that CEP is ranked 1st or 20th in terms of recall is essential context.  You can then set about assessing the appropriateness of your brand being linked to your target CEP(s).  Involve your creative agency as they will ultimately need to develop messaging that builds these links in the memories of the category buyer.

A Mental Availability Assessment Puts You on the Path to See the Whole Picture

Whilst a Mental Availability Assessment won’t give you the whole picture, it is incredibly difficult to see the whole picture without one.  So before you launch into the next season of brand planning, make sure you know how likely your brand is to be thought of in key buying situations and build from there.

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.

If you want to read a great book on the subject of Mental Availability then take a read of Jenni Romaniuk’s Book ‘Better Brand Health‘.

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Mark & Martin