This post explores the difference between being "known" and being "situationally-relevant," providing a blueprint for brand health tracking that drives effective brand performance.
To truly understand a brand’s success, we look beyond which brands consumers can recall, and focus on which brands come to mind in specific buying scenarios—a concept known as Mental Availability, as researched and published by Professors Jenni Romaniuk and Byron Sharp of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science.
Key Takeaways:
- The shift in perspective: Modern brand health measurement moves beyond simple recognition (brand awareness) toward the situational triggers of Mental Availability.
- How brands grow: Brands grow when they understand not just what consumers think about brands in their category, but what brings shoppers to the category in the first place (Category Entry Points), and then what brands they think of in those scenarios (Mental Availability).
- Turning insights to action: By using a brand tracker and social listening tools, businesses can optimize their business and marketing strategy to turn new customers into long-term brand advocates with sustainable brand loyalty.
- quantilope’s approach to brand health: quantilope’s Better Brand Health Tracking approach leverages Category Entry Points and Mental Availability metrics in a real-time dashboard accessible to all end users—without version control issues.
Table of Contents
- Why traditional brand health metrics are falling short for modern marketers
- The shift to Mental Availability
- Monitoring brand health with quantilope
- Frequently Asked Questions
Why traditional brand health metrics are falling short for modern marketers
In the past, a massive marketing budget and a catchy jingle were often enough to solidify a brand name in buyers’ memories. Within these efforts, marketers focused almost exclusively on brand awareness—a binary "yes/no" metric of whether a consumer had heard of a company. However, with so many brands inundating the market and flooding consumers’ digital channels, simply being aware of a brand is no longer enough to influence purchase decisions.
Below we'll explore some of the main reasons why traditional brand health metrics are falling short.
Over-emphasis on brand awareness
Marketers and business leaders often view brand awareness as the ultimate goal of marketing campaigns, when in reality, it’s not an accurate depiction of how consumers engage with a brand.
Awareness is divided into two distinct psychological processes:
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Brand Recall (Unaided): Your target audience’s ability to conjure your brand from memory when a category is mentioned. If someone thinks of "smartphones" and immediately says "iPhone," that is high-tier brand recall.
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Brand Recognition (Aided): This occurs when a consumer sees your logo somewhere (say, on social media or in a store) and remembers seeing it before.
While these are important and helpful KPIs, they don't account for brand reputation. Think of it this way: you can have 100% brand awareness but 0% purchase intent if your brand is associated with poor customer satisfaction or ethical concerns. This is where many marketing efforts stall—they optimize for reach but forget to optimize for relevance or sentiment.
Misleading share of voice
Share of voice (SOV) has traditionally been used as a proxy for awareness. The theory is that if you own 30% of the advertising space in your industry, you will eventually own 30% of the market share. While this correlation often holds, it ignores the quality of the conversation. High SOV driven by negative brand sentiment is not a sign of a healthy brand; it’s a sign of a PR crisis.
Dependency on Net Promoter Score (NPS)
NPS is a standard benchmark for brand health. By asking how likely a customer is to recommend you, you identify your brand advocates and your brand detractors.
- Advocates drive word-of-mouth, which is the most cost-effective way to gain new customers.
- Detractors provide essential customer feedback that can highlight failures in the customer journey.
NPS is a valid indicator of brand health, but not an all-encompassing resource. There are many other elements to consider when assessing your overall brand health.
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The shift to Mental Availability
While brand awareness measures which brands exist and how they compare, Mental Availability measures which brands come to mind in specific moments that are linked to purchase opportunities. These moments are known as Category Entry Points (CEPs) and are incredibly actionable insights to transform a brand/marketing strategy.
Category Entry Points (CEPs)
Category Entry Points are the mental cues that prompt consumers to think about a certain product/service category. These can be:
- Internal Cues: "When hungry," "While bored," "When feeling stressed."
- External Cues: "With friends," "At the airport," "When looking at my bank balance."
CEPs are important because a strong brand doesn't just want to be known; it wants to be the "mental solution" to these cues. If consumers aren’t thinking about your category during specific cues, they’re not going to be buying your brand.
Brands that successfully link their messaging/branding to a specific CEP (e.g., "Snickers - when you’re hungry") are ultimately the brands that “get bought”. This is the heart of effective brand building.
Measuring Mental Availability
Unlike brand awareness, Mental Availability is a compilation of four key metrics that each paint a picture of where a brand stacks up in their category. These Mental Availability metrics are:
- Mental Market Share: How present a brand is in consumers’ minds with regard to all Category Entry Points (CEPs) measured. Mental Market Share has been directly correlated to sales market share; in quantilope's own meta-analysis done in 2024 across more than 100 different brands, we found that the average correlation between MMS and sales data is at r = .83 with an R² of .69. This means that we can explain almost 70% of the variance in actual sales data through a single survey metric!
- Mental Penetration: How many consumers have at least some Mental Availability of a brand (i.e., how many consumers connect the brand to at least one measured CEP).
- Network Size: How broad/varied category associations are for each brand in your category. The more varied, the better (the more chances your brand comes to mind).
- Share of Mind: What other brands customers are thinking of in addition to a specific brand. In most cases, you can see which brands are 'stealing' share of mind; as your brand goes down, theirs goes up.
Brands can track these metrics over time the same way they would brand awareness in a traditional brand funnel tracker. As brands make changes to their marketing campaigns or other branding collateral based on CEP insights, they can see if Mental Availability scores rise in response.
Integrating Mental Availability insights into business strategy
A healthy brand doesn’t happen by accident; it’s the result of a deliberate brand strategy based on actual consumer insights. Below are a few ways to incorporate Mental Availability findings into your business strategy to grow and future-proof your brand.
- Align messaging with Category Entry Points (CEPs): Identify the specific cues, situations, and motivations that lead consumers to think of your category—such as "needing a quick energy boost" or "buying a gift for a colleague"—and align your messaging to these specific moments. For example, a fast-food chain might capitalize on the CEP "for a quick family dinner" by creating a tagline or campaign emphasizing family.
- Audit and reinforce Distinctive Brand Assets: Ensure your logos, colors, and mascots align with top CEPs and are consistent across all brand touchpoints to make your brand instantly recognizable in a crowded environment. Consider the above example of needing a quick dinner. You may go to the store "for a quick family dinner" and instantly think of (and look for) Old El Paso's signature yellow box for taco night. Distinctive assets don't necessarily need to align with the CEP's meaning; they need to anchor the brand to it.
- Prioritize reach over narrow targeting: Focus your media spend on reaching all potential category buyers rather than just heavy users, ensuring your brand stays "top of mind" for the widest possible audience before they even enter the buying phase. In fact, reaching current non-customers is the best way to grow your brand. If you can build just one mental connection among a new customer, your Mental Penetration will rise!
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Monitoring brand health with quantilope
quantilope’s Better Brand Health Tracking solution is centered around Category Entry Points and Mental Availability for a fully-automated approach to track and act on brand health insights. Better Brand Health Tracking studies are designed for the category, analyzed for the buyer, and reported on for the brand. Compare this to a traditional brand funnel study which generally hones in on awareness or brand perception for one particular brand and misses critical category context.
Perhaps the biggest shift in modern brand health efforts is the transition from static reports to real-time dashboards. What has traditionally been left to point-in-time report decks (with lengthy turnaround times and version control issues) can now be shared through modern, dashboards that are shareable in a single link and automatically update for all end users in real time. Dashboards also offer other benefits to users that static reports don’t (like real-time filtering capabilities, AI headline suggestions, quick branding customizations, etc.). Having this data at your fingertips, you can pivot/adjust marketing campaigns and brand positioning efforts as changes are happening, rather than as an afterthought. Similarly, if a new competitor enters the market, you can see their impact on your Mental Availability scores immediately and adjust your strategies accordingly.
By distinguishing between the broad reach of brand awareness and the situational power of Mental Availability, you can create a branding strategy that is both wide-reaching and deeply resonant, capitalizing on achievable whitespace opportunities.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs):
Interested in learning more about Mental Availability with quantilope? Get in touch below?
