Our desired outcome is to achieve organic brand growth.
As Martin Deboo writes in Marketing Week;
“The components of organic growth are, simply and exclusively: price (charging more, if you can get away with it), volume (selling more units) and mix (selling more higher-priced units.) These are different from, but complementary to, traditional marketing metrics such as penetration and loyalty.”
It was apparent in the latest round of quarterly result statements and investor Q&As that in 2024, companies are pursuing more balanced brand growth strategies, prioritising buyers’ needs, increasing investment in their core portfolios and innovation, whilst underpinning all of this with a commitment to marketing effectiveness.
Organisations such as P&G, Unilever and Kraft Heinz are calling out the importance of reaching more buyers, understanding the context in which these buyers interact with the category and to build “brand superiority”. I am staying clear of the brand differentiation debate, but I do believe that nurturing a positive brand image through a simple and consistently applied Positioning is an enabler of brand growth, and that is why it is included in this 5 Step Mental Availability Framework,
Understanding Mental Availability
Mental availability is not merely about brand awareness; it’s about ensuring that your brand is readily accessible in the minds of potential buyers at the moment they are making a purchase decision. It’s about creating strong mental associations between your brand and the relevant category entry points (CEPs) that buyers use to navigate their choices.
Mental Market Share (MMS), the percentage of all the brand links made to all the CEPs, is the primary measure of Mental Availability. There is a strong correlation between MMS and Sales Market Share. Unless your brand is part of a category that is declining quickly, an improvement in your Sales Market Share is an indicator of brand growth. So we can make solid assumptions that if the brand increases its likelihood of being retrieved in memory, i.e. improves Mental Market Share, then the brand should achieve organic sales growth.
The remainder of the article walks you through 5 key steps to achieve this growth, the headlines for which are listed below;
- Understand the retrieval cues, (Category Entry Points), Category Buyers use to access the category your brand participates in.
- Understand if the brand can credibly build associations with the most valuable Category Entry Points. Revisit brand positioning and tweak if appropriate to maximise opportunities.
- Place the brand in the same context as the target CEPs to build memory structures with buyers.
- A key principle of building Mental Availability is to reach as wide a group of Category Buyers as possible, with ‘messaging’ that will build brand associations with key CEPs.
- Having addressed the first 4 steps, develop specific messages or promotions, or other communication for particular target segments. This shouldn’t be done at the expense of reaching as many Category Buyers as possible.
Step 1 Identify CEPs
Category Entry Points are the Mental Pathways linking the buying situation and the brand.
For example;
Buying Situation: I have spilt something on my shirt
Category Entry Point: My brain will have an already formed mental pathway linking ‘removing a stain’ and a brand like Persil or Vanish. These brands are ‘easily thought of by me’ and assuming either one is ‘easy to buy’ then I don’t expend further mental energy on thinking about other brands.
How to identify the most important Category Entry Points is outlined in this video. Benefits of a Mental Availability Assessment
Having completed a Mental Availability Assessment it is possible to answer the following questions;
- Are any of the ‘white spaces’, (i.e. the CEPs where no brand has a mental advantage), realistically attainable, instinctively relevant to the brand’s positioning and valuable enough to pursue?
- Are there Category Entry Points ‘worth fighting for’, i.e. they are used by many category buyers, but there are few competitors in this space?
- Are there Category Entry Points where the mental advantage* is sufficiently strong that some investment could be reallocated to strengthen associations with other target CEPs?
* A mental advantage is when the number of links between a particular brand and a category entry point is higher than statistically expected.
Understanding Category Entry Points and the insights they can provide to unlock growth is fundamental. Make sure your teams embrace this critical context and buy them all a copy of ‘Better Brand Health’ by Professor Jenni Romaniuk.
Step 2 Brand Positioning
With a target list of Category Entry Points in hand it is time to check that the image that buyers of the category hold for your brand is complementary to pursuing these CEPs or whether there is a need to tweak the Brand’s Positioning to credibly build associations with these retrieval cues. I am not advocating re-positioning, except in extreme cases, but it is important to ensure that the brand is positioned to maximise opportunities in a consistent and coherent way.
This is essential preparation for the next step known as ‘Co-Presenting’.
Step 3 Co-Presenting
The way to make links more easily retrievable, or ‘fresher’, is to have the brand share the page/screen/audio moment with a CEP. This process of memory building is called ‘co-presentation’ and was introduced to us in the Business.Linkedin.com Paper ‘Category Entry Points in a B2B World’
“It is a competitive advantage for a brand to be easily retrievable when any CEP is activated because a brand that comes to mind is more likely to be bought than one that does not.”
Professor Jenni Romaniuk
The case studies in our database concur. We have found that on average there is only a 4% chance a brand is purchased if it cannot be linked to at least one Category Entry Point. Brands with low Mental Penetration are smaller in scale than brands with high Mental Penetration.
In their IPA paper earlier this month Dr Ella Ward & Byron Sharp IPA 10.9.24 point out that;
“…our communications should spotlight messages that will be useful to the consumer the next time they are in a buying situation. Messages that relate to how, why, when, or with whom buying or consumption will occur. By better understanding the mental pathways that consumers take when they become a category buyer and linking our brand to those messages (Category Entry Points), we build and reinforce useful associations which increase the Mental Availability of our brand.”
As we have stated in the past, this is not about restricting creative agencies, but instead liberating them with an open-ended brief with a clear objective to link the brand to the most valuable buying situations whilst conveying your intended brand image.
Step 4 Maximise Reach
A key principle of building Mental Availability is to reach as wide a group of Category Buyers as possible.
Professor John Dawes of the Ehrenberg Bass Institute introduced the 95:5 concept, emphasising the need to balance short-term conversion efforts with long-term brand building. This heuristic highlights that on average and depending on the category, 95% of potential buyers are not currently purchasing your product or service. A common mistake businesses make is allocating too many resources to convert the 5% of immediate buyers, neglecting the long-term recruitment of future customers.
Jon Bradshaw, founder of ‘Brand Traction’ has a neat way of capturing the intent of this;
“Being broadly effective, but somewhat inefficient, is better than being narrowly efficient, but less effective.”
The work of Rikard Wiberg at PACE is also worth a read if you are still in any doubt of the importance of reach.
“Is it wise to prioritise #Reach over #Conversions?” from Rikard Wiberg at PACE
In our own analysis we have seen the negative impact on brands who over invest in frequently reaching people who already buy their brand at the expense of recruitment of non-buyers. This video brings this point to life using a savoury cracker category case study.
Mental Availability deeper dive using real data.
There are 3 guides that will help as you consider the appropriate budget to allocate to a ‘Reach Strategy’.
i) Advertising Budget as a Percentage of Revenue
By no means a strict rule, but Grace Kite, founder of Magic Numbers suggests that following analysis of the ‘ARC Database’, Nielsen Data and the work of Paul Dyson, a spend of between 5% to 10% will usually achieve a competitive excess share of voice.
ii) Byron Sharp urges brand owners to spread the budget across the year to keep memory fresh and avoid long periods without advertising.
iii) Binet & Field suggest spending 60% of your budget on ‘brand building’ and 40% on ‘activation’. In the IPA paper ‘Effectiveness in Context,’ they provide a brilliant calculator that enables you to get to a number more applicable to your brand. This will help you as we transition to the 5th step of the Mental Availability Strategy, ‘Targeting’.
Step 5 Careful Targeting
In most cases, developing specific messages, promotions, or other communication targeting relevant segments you are particularly interested in converting to buy will be appropriate. For example, at SmilingCFO our strategy to recruit Marketing Leaders of FMCG brands will be different to our approach to recruiting Strategy Leaders from other agencies. But we are always conscious, as you should be, that targeting shouldn’t be done at the expense of reaching as many Category Buyers as possible.
Particular caution is required when considering how you reach your target given the evidence available warning brands of the inaccuracies of first/second/third party data. Read Jon Bradshaw’s article for more detail. $700bn delusion: Does using data to target specific audiences make advertising more effective? Latest studies suggest not | Mi3
“We can improve the quality of our targeting much better by just buying ads that appear in the right context, than we can by using my massive first party database to drive the buy, and it’s way cheaper to do that. Putting ads in contextually relevant places beats any form of targeting to individual characteristics. Even using your own data.”
Jon Bradshaw
Having accepted that we go into this with our eyes wide open, there is a benefit in developing different tactics for different segments. Mark Ritson brings this to life brilliantly with his ‘2-speed Plan’, an approach intended to build long-term brand equity AND convert buyers in the short term.
CONCLUSION
Building mental availability is a long-term process that requires a strategic and consistent approach. Remember, the key is to create strong mental associations between your brand and the relevant category entry points, ensuring that your brand is top-of-mind when consumers are in buying situations.
Ensure your intended brand image is reflected in your brand’s positioning so that what comes to mind when consumers think of your brand gives you the best chance of being associated with multiple buying situations.
These associations are built most effectively by co-presenting your brand in the right context and reaching as many buyers of the category as you can afford. There is a role for targeting, but ensure that these tactics are not at the expense of the overall Mental Availability objective.
This article deliberately remained focussed on Mental Availability, but of course, without strong Physical Availability brand growth will be restricted. The following blog outlines how Mental AND Physical Availability can combine to gain an edge over the competition.
Put Mental Availability and Physical Availability at the heart of your strategic thinking.
Martin Coyle is a former Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Commercial Officer at a global Bevco, with 30 years experience in FMCG. He is an expert in building Mental and Physical Availability, Portfolio Strategy development and aligning organisations behind brand execution.
