Essay
Mental Availability Is Not Brand Awareness
A crucial distinction that changes how you think about marketing investment.
Brand awareness asks: do people know you exist? Mental availability asks: do you come to mind when people are buying? These sound similar but imply completely different marketing strategies.
Most brands have awareness without availability. Everyone knows Kodak. No one thinks of Kodak when taking photos. The brand has awareness but has lost its mental availability in the photography category.
The Awareness Fallacy
Traditional brand tracking measures awareness: aided awareness, unaided awareness, top-of-mind awareness. These metrics are easy to measure. They feel important. They have been industry standards for decades.
The problem: awareness does not predict buying. People can be aware of brands they never consider purchasing. Awareness measures memory for brand names, not likelihood to buy.
Mental availability measures something different: the probability that your brand comes to mind and is noticed in buying situations. This is what actually predicts market share.
How Mental Availability Works
Marketing science from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute shows that buying decisions are driven by what comes to mind at the moment of decision. Buyers do not conduct comprehensive evaluations. They consider the brands that are mentally available to them in the specific buying situation.
Mental availability is built through:
Links to Category Entry Points. When someone is in a buying situation (emergency, planned need, occasion), does your brand come to mind? The more situations linked to your brand, the higher your mental availability.
Distinctive assets. Can your brand be recognized quickly without the brand name? Distinctive colors, logos, visuals help the brand be noticed amid competition.
Fresh memory structures. Memory decays. Without reinforcement, brand links weaken. Consistent presence maintains mental availability.
Why the Distinction Matters
Different goals produce different strategies:
Awareness building focuses on reach and frequency. Get the brand name in front of people. The metric is "have you heard of us?"
Mental availability building focuses on linking the brand to buying situations. Associate the brand with specific needs and occasions. The metric is "when you need X, what brand comes to mind?"
Awareness campaigns might achieve high awareness scores without building mental availability. You can know a brand exists without ever thinking of it when you have a need it could address.
Implications for Local Business
Local service businesses often misunderstand their mental availability challenge. They assume their problem is "people do not know we exist." More often, their problem is "people do not think of us when they need what we sell."
The strategies differ:
If the problem is awareness, broadcast your existence. Signs, vehicles, general advertising. Get the name out there.
If the problem is mental availability, associate your brand with specific buying situations. "Emergency plumber" needs different memory structures than "bathroom remodel contractor." Build links to the CEPs that matter for your business.
Google search reveals mental availability gaps. When someone searches and does not click on you, that is a moment where your mental availability failed. You were not top of mind, so they searched. Then you did not capture their attention in the results.
Measuring Mental Availability
Mental availability is harder to measure than awareness. True measurement requires research: presenting buying situations and asking which brands come to mind.
Proxies that indicate mental availability:
- Brand search volume: People searching for your brand name indicates mental availability
- Direct traffic: People going directly to your website suggests they thought of you
- Referral mentions: Being recommended suggests mental availability in the referrer's mind
- Share of voice: Being mentioned in relevant contexts indicates association with those contexts
But these are proxies. The clearest signal is market share growth, which correlates with mental availability.
Building Mental Availability
To build mental availability rather than just awareness:
Identify your Category Entry Points. What situations trigger people to need what you sell? What are the specific circumstances that lead to buying? Map these thoroughly.
Link your brand to those CEPs. In messaging, advertising, and content, associate your brand with the situations where you want to be remembered. Do not just say "we exist." Say "when you have [situation], think of us."
Build and maintain distinctive assets. Make your brand recognizable. Consistent visuals, colors, and style that trigger brand recognition without requiring the name to be seen.
Maintain presence. Memory fades. Regular presence refreshes mental availability. Dark periods without marketing allow competitors to build availability that displaces yours.