The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute defines mental availability as “the propensity of the brand to be thought of, or noticed, in buying situations.” In simpler terms, in relevant buying situations, customers easily recall brands with high mental availability. Brand campaign - Image 1: no more solo acts Embracing Customer-Centricity While this seems simple, this school of thought requires a radical shift in the way B2B marketers approach marketing.
To be precise, mental availability requires marketers to become less brand-centric, and night clubs and bars email list more customer-centric. Putting ourselves in the minds of our customers isn’t easy. Here are some primary questions we should be addressing: On what occasions / at what moments in our consumers’ lives can our brand come to mind? What opportunities are we currently overlooking? Where are our competitors beating us in the battle for mental availability? Are there competitors in those moments, from products in other market categories that we haven’t recognized as our direct competition? The following step should be to immerse ourselves in those moments by identifying the memory structures linked to them.
We call these moments category entry points (CEPs), and the more of them our brand can engage with, the greater our “mental availability” becomes, and the more products we are likely to sell. So we started identifying these moments, and we came up with several variations of our new branding campaign. Here is a non-comprehensive list of CEPs that came out after a diagnosis phase, which included interviews with both customers and internal stakeholders.