You might have the finest product or service in your sector, the smartest positioning, or the best offer on the market. But if people don’t think of you when they need what you sell, none of that matters. You might as well be waving frantically at someone in the darkest of dark rooms. Because it’s not always the best that wins. It’s the brands that come to mind first, the ones that are recognised, the ones that people recall, that win. And that’s what ‘mental availability’ is.
Mental Availability
Put simply, mental availability is about how likely a brand is to be remembered when it counts most: in a buying moment. Developed by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science, mental availability focuses on building and reinforcing ‘memory structures’ that make your brand easy to recall by more people, in more buying situations.
That’s what every business is after isn’t it, being front of mind when a decision gets made? Brands with strong mental availability don’t just appear in searches, they appear first in people’s minds.
How To Build Mental Availability
There are two critical factors when it comes to strengthening the mental availability of your brand:
- Category Entry Points (CEPs)
CEPs are situations, needs, or mental cues that trigger a purchase decision. For example, a café might be linked to moments like getting your morning coffee on the go, meeting a friend or needing a quiet workspace. And the more of these a brand is mentally connected to, the more chances it has to be remembered.
- Distinctive Brand Assets (DBAs)
We’re talking about the recognisable assets a brand possesses that act as mental shortcuts: logos, colours, fonts, jingles, taglines, characters, tone of voice. They’re the things that make someone see blue and yellow and think “IKEA,”. Or hear “I’m lovin’ it” and instantly know it’s McDonald’s. When used consistently, these distinctive brand assets are powerful tools that strengthen recall and recognition. Do that and that’s half the battle won.
Mental Availability vs. Brand Awareness
Just want to drop a quick note in here to say people often confuse mental availability with brand awareness but they’re not quite the same. Brand awareness is knowing a plumbing firm’s name. Mental availability is remembering that plumbing firm when a pipe bursts.
Why It Matters For Growth
Research from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute shows that higher mental availability is a crucial driver of growth. That’s because people take shortcuts. As humans, inherently we don’t like friction in the decision-making process. And we often equate familiarity with trust. Meaning we don’t compare all options available to us, we choose from what comes to mind first and feels familiar and satisfactory enough.
Mental availability also links closely to ‘Mental Market Share’. The easier to buy, easier to find, easier to try you are (your brand’s physical availability), the higher your brand’s share of memory links in a category are. And the higher your mental market share, the more likely you are to be chosen.
Physical availability working together with mental availability increases your chances of coming to mind ahead of your competitors in buying moments.
And it’s that difference between brand awareness and mental availability that drives growth.
How You Increase Your Brand’s Mental Availability
So how do you go about building the stuff? Well, you don’t earn mental availability simply by just shouting louder or selling harder. You earn it by showing up consistently, distinctively, memorably, and making a lasting impression over time. Here’s how you go about that:
- Expand Your Category Entry Points
Understand the different reasons and moments that trigger why people might buy what you sell. Then connect your brand to as many of those as possible through messaging that resonates, your advertising and your marketing activity.
- Reinforce Your Distinctive Brand Assets
Use your colours, logo, fonts, tone of voice consistently across all your activity and touchpoints. Because repetition (done well) is what cements memories.
- Prioritise Reach Over Precision
Now this one might sound more contentious but reach as many potential buyers as you can (within the context of your sector). Building memory structures across a wide audience is what drives significant growth, not narrow targeting. You can only squeeze so much out of the same people over and over again when you fish in a small pool. Fishing in a bigger pool opens up greater opportunities for new customers and increased sales. And keep showing up. In simple terms, the more familiar you become, the easier you are to recall. Fame, fluency, familiarity is how brands get remembered.
Why SMEs Can Sometimes Miss This
Smaller businesses often put all their efforts into short-term ‘sales led’ messaging and activity. But that ignores the fact that people aren’t always ‘in market’ for what they sell.
Constant ‘buy now’ offer led messages are ignored by the majority of people who don’t want or need their product or service at that point in time. Which also means the message (and brand) is ignored.
And when people do come into market and need or want what they sell, they’ll only be considered if people can think of them first. Because people go with:
- Who they’ve heard of
- Who comes to mind
- Who’s been visible before
So if you’re not building those mental links, you’re easy to overlook when they need what you sell.
The Commercial Advantage Of Being Remembered
Being remembered makes selling a lot easier than constantly fighting to be found. Brands who’ve built strong mental availability get inbound leads without pushing. They’re recommended by name, they’re sought out. They beat their competition before the fight even starts. They’re easy to think of because they’ve already found space in the customer’s mind. And in today’s noisy world, that’s gold.
When you come to mind first ion the minds of your customers, you’re building your pipeline and creating future demand. Which helps smooth out future cashflows and makes them more predictable, creates pricing power and lowers acquisition costs.
Want To Be Remembered? Want To Be Bought?
All the stuff that goes into building mental availability, being remembered and being front of mind when people need what you sell: the distinctive identity, the compelling messaging, the strategy, the consistent delivery across multiple marketing channels, it’s what we do. And we can nail it for you. So if you want to talk about how we can do amazing things for your brand and with your marketing, let’s chat.
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