Welcome to our new series, “The Breakdown.” Each post breaks down a complex marketing concept and explores its applications—helping you make smarter decisions that drive meaningful results.
How often do you say “grab a Kleenex” instead of “grab a tissue?” Or ask, “Do you have a Band-Aid?” rather than say “I need an adhesive bandage?” What about, “Where’s the Tupperware?” versus “Where are your plastic food containers?”
These are all examples of mental availability—the ease with which a brand comes to mind in a buying situation, whether or not someone is actively shopping—at work. It’s what keeps brands top of mind when it matters most.
Brands can’t be chosen if they aren’t known, but awareness alone isn’t enough. Yahoo remains a well-known name in search, but when consumers need to look something up, they instinctively “Google it.” The critical difference between awareness and mental availability lies in being remembered in the moment of need. Awareness means consumers recognize a brand when they see it, but mental availability means the brand automatically comes to mind in buying or usage situations.
Mental availability builds over time. Brands with more distinctive creative assets and consistent presence have stronger salience. They come to mind easily and often across many category entry points—aka those moments when buyers enter the market, like when someone first thinks “I need running shoes” or “I’m out of paper towels.” Advertising helps drive this mental availability, going beyond brand awareness and keeping a product present in the mind when audiences are making or considering a purchase. Every impression, sound, and symbol compounds to make a brand easier to recall later.
Research shows that advertising awareness directly correlates to mental availability, which in turn results in tangible business outcomes. Specifically, there’s a measurable correlation between mental availability and market share: As brands become more mentally available, market share tends to follow. Familiarity breeds preference, and that preference translates to purchase behavior. The more a brand’s advertising is noticed and remembered—especially across different category entry points—the more space that brand holds in memory and the greater likelihood of being chosen when a purchase decision arises.
A strong example of mental availability at work is Heinz’s “Draw Ketchup” campaign. Instead of claiming to be the standard for ketchup, the brand proved it by asking audiences to draw ketchup. Nearly everyone drew some iteration of a Heinz bottle, and the brand launched a global campaign featuring the activation video as well as the drawings. That deep-rooted mental availability translated directly into business impact: The campaign drove double-digit increases in purchase intent and boosted market share despite price increases and rising competition.
Heinz’s success stemmed from leveraging the mental availability the brand had already built through decades of consistent marketing. The drawings demonstrated that Heinz not only had high brand awareness, but that it had, in fact, become the default mental representation of ketchup itself. When consumers thought “ketchup,” they pictured Heinz. The campaign simply made that unconscious association conscious and celebrated it, reinforcing existing memory structures and demonstrating how by focusing on mental availability, brands can become inseparable from the product itself.
Mental availability is built through consistency. It requires deliberate, sustained investment and effort to connect brands with the moments that matter to buyers.
Advertisers can strengthen mental availability through steady market presence rather than intermittent campaigns, reinforcing distinctive creative assets like colors, packaging, slogans, or sounds, and tracking recognition and recall as signals of future demand.
Brands should also consider multiple buying situations—both the obvious product need, as well as the contexts surrounding it. By seeking to understand where customers are when they need a product, what they’re trying to accomplish, and the emotions at play, teams can craft campaigns that connect brands to diverse category entry points.
In the end, growth comes from owning the moment when consumers think of your category. Advertising drives mental availability by ensuring brands are present in those critical moments.
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Long-term investments in brand awareness are critical for building mental availability. Yet amidst prolonged economic uncertainty, many budgets continue to lean heavily toward short-term performance. In Balancing Performance with Brand in Uncertain Times, we break down key considerations for marketing leaders as they strategize around their media investments.
