By James ‘JT’ Turner

Most brand trackers can tell you how many people know your name. Far fewer can tell you if anyone thinks of your brand at the moment they need what you sell. The gap between the two may sound small, but it changes what we’re measuring.

I was discussing this recently with Nigel Hollis Advisor at Delineate, former Chief Global Analyst at Kantar, and author of The Global Brand and Brand Pyramid, and came to the conclusion that we are sometimes too loose with the term mental availability. A lot of research that claims to measure it is really measuring unaided brand awareness, usually by framing the question around a category: Which brands of toothpaste can you think of? Which brands of sunscreen can you think of?

There’s nothing wrong with those questions. They are quick, familiar, and tell you something useful. But “right from the get-go”, says Nigel, “most market research puts limits around what people are going to think of.” Framing does more work than it appears to. Before even the respondent has answered, we’ve already decided what market they’re in.

If someone wants to protect themselves from the sun, sunscreen is only one possible answer. They might wear sun-protective clothing, sit under an umbrella, find some shade, or simply stay out of the sun. In the US, National Cancer Institute figures from 2020 show that more adults regularly sought shade than used sunscreen, 39% versus 37%.

If you sell sunscreen, that matters. Some of the people you most need to understand may not be thinking about sunscreen at all. Start the research by asking which sunscreen brands they know, and you’ll never see that.

That is the important distinction between awareness and mental availability. Awareness can tell you whether somebody knows the brand once you have put them inside the category. Mental availability is about whether the brand comes to mind in a relevant buying or usage situation in the first place.

And the situation matters enormously.

Ask someone which electric vehicle brands they can think of, and Tesla may come straight to mind. Ask them which vehicle they would consider buying for themselves and their needs, and Tesla may disappear as a choice immediately. Nothing has changed about their awareness of the brand. However, the context has changed what is relevant.

The same applies to much more ordinary decisions. A consumer standing in their kitchen at six o’clock is probably thinking, what am I going to cook for dinner? They are not starting with, which brand of baked beans should I buy?

Baked beans must become one of the answers to the dinner question before Heinz, or any other brand gets a chance to compete. Yet research often starts at that second stage because businesses naturally think in terms of categories, competitors, and market share. But consumers don’t necessarily think that way.

Businesses have a habit of defining what’s important before giving the consumer much opportunity to tell us what’s important. That can leave you with a very healthy awareness number and a much less certain picture of mental availability.

This is a fairly uncomfortable thought if you run a tracker. An 80% brand awareness score is not really 80% mental availability if it took people a while to think of baked beans as an option in the first place, never mind Heinz.

It also works the other way. A brand may become highly relevant in a particular context even if it would not dominate a generic awareness question. Where somebody is, what they are doing, and even the time of day can change which brands come to mind.

Coca-Cola may not be the first thing somebody names when asked what satisfies thirst. But after walking in the mountains on a hot day, reaching a refuge where you know Coca-Cola is likely to be available; the brand can suddenly make complete sense. It’s familiar; it has caffeine and sugar and fits the moment. Do the same walk later in the afternoon and beer might come to mind instead. The need is broadly the same, but the context has changed the answer.

That’s still mental availability, but it’s much harder to understand if all you have is a general measure of which brands people recall within a category.

Anyone working with Category Entry Points will recognize some of this territory. CEPs help us understand the situations and cues associated with category buying. But there is a useful question at one stage earlier too: when that situation arises, what solutions come to mind at all? Does your category even make the list?

That matters because brands don’t only compete with other brands. Sometimes the competition is another category, another behavior, or simply doing nothing.

It also widens the discussion beyond purchase. Mental availability has a role in usage as well. For a sunscreen brand, deciding how to protect yourself from the sun this afternoon may be every bit as important as the moment someone stands in front of a shelf buying the bottle.

None of this makes the traditional awareness question redundant. It measures something real and useful. The problem comes when we ask it to tell us more than it can.

There is a simple check for anyone running a tracker. Find the first brand question in the questionnaire. If it starts by naming the category, you’re measuring what people can recall once that category has already been supplied. Then look for the opposite. Is there anywhere in the tracker that begins with the consumer situation? What were they trying to do? What needs to arise? What options occurred to them? What came to mind before the research told them which category to think about?

If there isn’t, the tracker may be giving a very accurate answer to a narrower question than marketing believes it asked.

The encouraging part is that none of this requires a research breakthrough. “I think it’s pretty easy,” says Nigel. “It’s just that most brands are not asking the right questions at the moment.”

For me, that starts with whether we let the consumer define the situation first or define the market for them and then measure what happened inside it. Businesses naturally organize markets around categories, competitors, and market share. Consumers have something they want to do, a problem they want to solve, or a need they want to satisfy. A good tracker needs to understand both.

Your tracker will probably tell you if people have heard of your brand, especially if framed within the category, but that is not the same as mental availability.  Ask yourself if you had not led with the category, would they have named your brand? We’d love to hear your thoughts, get in touch with our team today.