Read mental availability against the size of your brand

Mental availability is how likely your brand is to come to mind when someone is in a buying situation, and how many buying situations it comes to mind in. The usual way to measure it is with Category Entry Points, a method from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. You list the situations that lead people into your category, then ask which brands they link to each one. It is one of the most useful tools a marketer has for finding where to grow. But the scores need to be read against the size of your brand, or they will mislead you.

Here is why. One of the longest-standing findings in marketing research is that people who buy a brand link it to more things than people who don't. Andrew Ehrenberg and his colleagues showed it in 1970. Researchers from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and Kingston University tested it again on dozens of new data sets, across services, durables, retailers and several countries, and found it still holds. So a big brand tends to score well on almost every buying situation, mostly because so many people buy it. A small brand will score lower almost everywhere.

That changes what a good score means. A high score may be telling you how big you are, more than how well your marketing is working. The more useful question is where your brand scores lower than its size would lead you to expect. Those are the buying situations where people are not thinking of you, and that is where the odds of finding growth are better.

The National Lottery in Ireland is a good example. When Paul was there, the brand already had very high penetration and people bought it often. Research turned up a buying situation where it could win more: people who had already decided to give someone a card and were wondering what to put in it. About half of adults thought of a Lottery product as a gift for a card. For most brands that would be a good number. For a brand that big, it meant half its market wasn't thinking of it at that moment. The ads running at the time were funny and well made, but they weren't about gifting. So the Millionaire Raffle campaign was rebuilt so that every scene linked the brand to the gift in a card. The raffle sold out, the advertising had to be pulled, and it kept selling out in the years after. Paul tells the full story in his case study.

So what can you do with it? List the buying situations in your category and find out roughly how many people are in each one. Measure which brands people link to each situation, then set your scores beside your penetration. Where you sit below your size, there is room to grow. Pick one or two of those situations your brand can credibly own, make the advertising about that moment, and keep the brand in every frame. Then track the same measures over time, alongside sales, so you know whether it worked.

Charlie