Here, I am going to talk you through why Mental and Physical Availability can be used to gain an advantage over your competitors. It might seem ‘that’s for the big brands’, but I assure you that when you read on, you will realise that no matter your size, there is an approach that will make a difference.
A Quick Story of Mental and Physical Availability in Action
One day last Summer, while navigating the collection of breakfast from Starbucks and various pieces of fruit, I attempted a balancing act of said items through the hotel lobby and onward to my room. The coffee inevitably found the carpet, walls and door in one drop. Quite remarkable how far a Grande Americano can spread.
Mortified, I returned to reception to announce my avoidable mishap, and with raised eyebrows, the kind person told me not to worry and said it would be dealt with.
I went off to Starbucks to get coffee again. Starbucks said it was ‘on the house’ for my being an idiot—my words, not theirs.
I needed to make it okay with the person at the hotel, who was already looking very busy before I ruined their morning.
Tesco for a treat would be the way to say sorry. I had no idea what treat it would be, but it would be a chocolate of some sort, and so set in motion the work that the brilliant team at Cadbury do.
Physical and Mental Availability Operating in Unison
Physical Availability:
Cadbury is a master at this. Merchandised well to ensure that the Dairy Milk bar was easy to find.
Mental Availability:
The recent communications from Cadbury ensuring the all-important Category Entry Points of ‘gift/ saying sorry/wanting to please someone’ was now cemented in my mind.
At that precise moment, no other option was even considered.
A Cadbury chocolate bar (large, of course; the coffee did hit the wall after all) was purchased, and a smile on the face of the person whose morning I had ruined.
Nice work, Cadbury.
Cadbury are masters at this, and other market leaders also offer brilliant Physical and Mental Availability strategies.
Warburtons is another great example of a market leader following this formula. Bravo to the agency (JOYFUL & TRIUMPHANT) and the folks at Warburtons.
System1 give this 4.5*, which is out of 5 by the way, so it’s very good!
Warburton’s cast Hollywood icons to entertain. If you look through the archive, you will see that Samuel L Jackson stars alongside ‘Toasties’, Robert De Niro co-stars with Warburton’s bagels and the Muppets showcase crumpets. The clever bit is that these different products are suitable for different buying situations and prompt a variety of memory retrieval cues (Category Entry Points) that make the brand easier to be thought of in the future. As a result, Warburtons is the only bread brand in the top 3 that has a Mental Advantage across multiple category entry points. (Source: SmilingCFO database).
So, if this is what success looks like, what is the journey to get there?
Let’s go right back to the beginning and understand what Mental and Physical Availability can mean for your brand.
The idea of Mental and Physical Availability was introduced by The Ehrenberg Bass Institute and is an approach adopted by some of the world’s best brand builders, including Diageo, Coke and McDonalds.
This familiar equation of;
Mental Availability + Physical Availability = Brand Growth
has been expanded to include the importance of ‘emotional resonance’ – Binet 2021
We can see in the Cadbury’s Dairy Milk example that they have all 3 bases successfully covered.
So, how do I build Mental Availability?
When a brand becomes mentally available in a buying situation, it takes that first step toward being bought, and there are 2 major contributors to making your brand easier to recall in buying situations;
i) Category Entry Points – “the mental pathways that link a brand to a buying situation” – Romaniuk 2022
ii) Distinctive Assets – “the non-brand name elements that trigger the brand into the memory of category buyers – Romaniuk, 2016b; Sharp & Romaniuk 2010
Let’s look at these two pillars of effective marketing in a bit more detail
Category Entry Points are the building blocks of Mental Availability
Without the identification of the memory retrieval cues (CEPs) for the buying situations relating to your category, it is not possible for you to calculate your brand’s mental availability. We have a video that explains in detail how you can build your own Mental Availability Assessment (Benefits of a Mental Availability Assessment), so I won’t go into detail here, but these are a few of the headlines.
Category Entry Points (CEPs) exist irrespective of brands.
The more category entry points your brand is linked to the greater the chance of being retrieved from memory in buying situations.
Some category entry points are more important than others.
Because we are interested in buying situations, we track the responses of the category buyer, not necessarily the consumer.
Professor Romaniuk stresses the importance of any CEP research following this 3 point structure;
- Design for the category
- Report for the buyer
- Analyse for the brand
The output from which provides us with 4 Mental Availability Metrics;
- Mental Market Share
The share of all the links that are made between the category entry points and the brands (i.e. the Mental Market Share). You can think of this a little bit like your ‘sales market share’, where you’re keen to understand the brand’s share of all the sales in the market.
- Mental Penetration
This is a key measure because it’s a good step on from Prompted Brand Awareness and tells you how many Category Buyers can link the brand to at least one Category Entry Point (CEP).
- Network Size
Is useful as it identifies the average number of CEPs that are linked to a brand by a Category Buyer. These Category Buyers do not necessarily buy your brand, but they are able to make at least one CEP link to the brand being evaluated.
- Share of mind
Helps owners of large brands understand how vulnerable they are to competitor incursion. In other words, who is starting to encroach on a brand’s ‘territory’, and what level of ‘cut through’ are they achieving.
In order for your mental availability strategies to be effective, you first need to check that your brand can be linked to the correct category. Prompted Awareness is the best metric to track. This might seem obvious, but it is a critical first step and one that a surprising number of brands score lower than expected.
In our research of 8 different FMCG categories, a startling number of brands were not linked to the correct category.
The chart above shows how many brands have a prompted awareness of under 50% (amber), and many have less than 25% (yellow), meaning that ¾ of category buyers were unable to link the ‘yellow’ brands to the correct category despite being shown logos of the brand.
If you think you might be one of these brands, allocate as much of your budget as you can afford, divide it by 52, and invest in reaching as many category buyers as you can once before spending an extra £ on communicating with a category buyer twice.
Lay this foundation, and you will be ready to move on to the next phase of strengthening your brand’s mental availability, which is to ensure your brand can be linked to at least one category entry point. This ‘Mental Penetration’ measure is a good step on from Prompted Awareness.
You will likely have a high Mental Penetration score if you are a leading brand.
But dig a little deeper, and you might be in the same situation as most brands in our UK database. This Mental Penetration chart (below) shows that the majority of non-buyers are unable to make a single link between a brand and a 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. In short, that means the brand has no cut-through, and it is doubtful that these non-buyers will be ‘converted’ in the future without new intervention.
Getting to grips with what and how your non-buyers are thinking is where the richness lies, after all, brands grow by recruiting light and non-buyers. Understanding your Mental Penetration score is one of the critical metrics that will help you develop a compelling recruitment strategy and build your Mental Availability.
Ultimately, the goal is to maximise the chances of being thought of in buying situations by linking the brand to a wide range of category entry points. The best measurement to understand your brand’s performance is Network Size. In our database, the leading brands average between 5 & 8 CEPs per category buyer, with Greggs achieving the highest score so far with a 10.2 average.
A quick review of Greggs advertising points to why its Network Size is so strong. The campaign “Available everywhere. Enjoyed anywhere ” reminds people of its widespread high street presence and promotes the relevance of its wide range of ‘food on the go’ options.
Greggs has more than 2300 shops across the UK with plans to expand to 3000, so their physical availability is assured. This level of guaranteed distribution is what most brand owners can only dream of. Yes, of course, some are successful DTC (Direct to Consumer) brands, but even for those brands, there will come a point when further growth will probably need to come from in-store availability. “Buyers are variety seekers who appreciate easily presented options – and as of now, that will mostly take place in physical stores.” – Tanusondjaja (Ehrenberg Bass) Jun 2023 commenting on a WSJ article by Suzanne Kapner ‘brands returning to physical stores they once shunned’. https://www.wsj.com/articles/brands-wanted-to-cut-out-stores-not-anymore-817b3809
How Do I Build Physical Availability?
I don’t intend to deep dive this topic in this blog, but I do offer 3 tips;
1. Behind every brand’s success is a compelling customer rationale
Based on this chart, brand 5 has the beginnings of a rationale for more space on the shelf. Normally, Mental Market Share (MMS) and Sales Market Share (SMS) have a close correlation. In this example, the sales penetration for Brand 5 is lower than one would expect, probably due to the space being afforded to the ‘big 4’. The relatively strong MMS score for Brand 5 hints at its potential and a sales upside for the retailer. Assuming there is a margin benefit if buyers move to Brand 5, then this is a good story with which to arm the sales team.
2. Understanding the role of ‘autopilot’
If you are one of the big brands, then you will want category buyers to stay on ‘autopilot’. As Phil Barden explains in his book Decoded, when the purchase is routine/habitual, then the automatic and effortless processes of system 1 leads the purchasing behaviour. If you are a challenger brand, then you will want to trigger the reflective mental processes (‘Pilot’) to play more of a role in the purchase decision.
Writing in the Journal of Retailing December 2022, Oliver Koll and Andreas Plank’s research confirmed that if the context remains stable, then category buyers are more likely to buy the same brand on the next category purchase. (Context includes same retailer, basket size or weekday as on previous occasions).
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022435922000033?via%3Dihub
So, brands endeavouring to break through need to find ways to disrupt normal purchase behaviour. Tactics to support your distribution could be to allocate more space or impactful displays in key promotional periods. At some point, it will also need to include point-of-purchase materials, including retail media. As the Grocer highlighted in a November article, some of these retail fees can be “eye-watering”, so they offer some guidance on how start-ups and challenger brands can navigate trade investment requests.
The reality is that some investment will be required if you are to optimise your brand’s physical availability, so my guidance would be not to widen your distribution beyond the point at which you can afford to support its rate of sale. Success in a small number of stores is the way to demonstrate your brand’s potential as part of your customer rationale.
3. Maximising your distinctive assets
These assets can be anything from logos, colours, taglines, or even specific sounds. They act as mental shortcuts for category buyers, cementing brand recognition and building trust. When category buyers see or hear these assets, they immediately associate them with your brand, and any changes to them can disrupt this mental association. (Romaniuk 2018).
The challenge is that when trying to execute activity in store an increasing number of retailers insist on the use of their branding. This makes sense; after all they have their own distinctive assets to protect. But it does mean that as a brand owner, you have to ensure that your packaging stands out and reinforces the cues that would have been visible in your advertising, website, etc.
Let us return to Cadbury’s Dairy Milk. You might not have consciously spotted it the first time you watched it, but the brand and the purple colourways are visible throughout. I then walk into the store on my “sorry for spilling my coffee” buying situation, and I see purple in the space on the shelf I expect to see purple. Purchase made in less than a second.
Where we see some differences
Compare that to when I buy bread. As I said earlier, I am a big fan of Warburtons, but they are not as easy to buy as they could be. As I searched the bread aisle, I counted 7 Warburtons products, all with a different colour palette. In this situation, a purchase could have taken me 30 seconds or more, a lifetime for the autopilot. It is likely that in a normal buying scenario, my ‘pilot’ would have kicked in and reflected that the Own Label or No. 2 brand are more than an adequate alternative.
Conclusion
The intent of this article was to show you what great looks like by providing examples of top brands following the ‘how brands grow’ formula with great success. But I also wanted to provide hope and encouragement to challenger brands because there is a playbook to follow, irrespective of budget.
In fact, the creation of distinctive assets can be relatively low cost. It is the discipline to apply these assets without compromise that drives success consistently. For any of my Mark Ritson mMBA alumni, you will recall the ‘Codify the sh*t out of everything section delivered this ruthlessly well.
The identification of the Category Entry Points for the category your brand is associated with is also an affordable exercise. Of course, you won’t build a Network Size equivalent to the brand leaders without time and investment, but take comfort in the knowledge that some of your competitors are still focused on building loyalty and being ‘famous for one thing’ rather than trying to build wider fresher networks with as many category buyers as possible.
The evidence points to the fact that if you follow the playbook advocated for in this article, you will already be one step ahead of some of your competition.
Good luck, and play the game better than the alternatives in your field.
Quick Tip:
Make a start now and read my partner’s blog on how to optimise the brand planning process. This will get you ahead of the game very quickly.
As a Partner at SmilingCFO, Mark combines his brand positioning expertise with the latest in data-driven marketing strategies. He has an MBA in business and has completed both of Mark Ritson’s mMBA marketing programmes. As Founder of Brand Positioning, he has consulted on brands such as Whitbread, Yamaha, Budweiser Budvar, Pizza Hut, Boon Rawd International, Slimming World and Risk Capital Partners.
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