Track your brand's mental availability

• Know whether your sales and market share is likely to grow or decline
• Document long-term effects of advertising on brand metrics that actually affect sales
• Make concrete, evidence-based decisions to adjust messaging and media plans

NSB Marketing Best Practice provides our clients a tried and tested process for identifying and prioritising category entry points and tracking mental availability.

Our approach is based on years of our own experience of working in practice with consumer research methodologies laid out in published papers from leading marketing scientists from University of Florida, ESSEC, the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and many others.

Now, we are offering it worldwide.

How?

These are the steps we take to map out how your brand can come to mind in buying situations:

  • 1. What is already known?

    After getting an overview of your previous market research, we do our own desktop research and analysis.

  • 2. What's our hypothesis?

    In a workshop with your project team we list potential situations and other potential triggers for your brand — or competitors.

  • 3. How do people think?

    Then we'll conduct qualitative research, speaking to potential buyers to understand how they categorise and associate and what words they use.

  • 4. How many and how often?

    Based on pts. 1-3 we'll design a quantitative study to measure the size of the different category entry points and how many people connect your brand to them vs competitors.

  • 5. What does this mean in practice?

    Finally, we provide a comprehensive but intuitive report summing up the results with our recommendations for category entry points with greatest growth potential.

  • 6. Build and track.

    With category entry points identified and prioritised you have now defined the battlefield for growth. Keeping score on a quarterly basis provides actionable feedback to adjust budgets, messaging and media plans for effective and responsive brand building.

Through this 5-7 week process you will learn what category entry points are more important and how your brand scores against competitors.

This will allow you to see clearly the biggest opportunities for growth, how to build mental availability in practice and how to document the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.

Large world-class FMCG brands, services, B2Bs and startups alike are increasingly using category entry points as the building blocks of mental availability and growth.

According to science ...

Professors Byron Sharp and Jenni Romaniuk from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute of Marketing Science coined the term mental availability in their seminal book How Brands Grow. One major finding they and other researchers have proved through rigorous scientific study is that brand awareness, attitudes and stated preferences are not static but differ from situation to situation. Yet most brand reports are designed as if answers to questions like "which brands in category X you have heard of", or "the next time you will by Y, who are you most likely to choose?" are critical for decision-making.

Ask what triggers the brand, not what the brand triggers

Studies from marketing science also supports the rather logical observation that if you aren't brought to mind, it doesn't matter how good your product is, or how "strong" your brand is. Providing a product that people want is key. But what matters most for future purchase probability is being thought of and recognised by more people, more often. Despite this, most discussions about "brand-building" start — and often end — with "what do people think about our brand?".

What matters for growth?

Buying situations is where coming to mind actually matter for the sales of a brand. So-called category entry points are thus the building blocks of mental availability. Any thoughts people might have that can trigger one or more brands from memory in a potential buying situation are associations that are beneficial for brands to get connected to.

Stop obsessing over brand perception and start discovering where in people's lives your brand can be relevant and come to mind.

 

Would you like to know more about how building mental availability could help increase growth?

Pick a time in our calendar and book an informal 15 minute advisory chat.