Mental Penetration is a key metric of Mental Availability.
Jenni Romaniuk explains in her book ‘Better Brand Health’;
“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.”
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.
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.
This gin case study brings this concept to life.
Further reading:
Take a read of the brilliant and probably most important marketing book: Byron Sharp’s How Brands Grow.
