What is mental availability?

A new buzz word has entered the marketing world: mental availability.

But what exactly is it?

It’s not brand awareness and category entry points (CEPs), indeed there’s a whole host of things that it is not.

What it is according to Clear Channel UK is a brand’s propensity to be thought of in a buying situation, with CEPs being the cue categories that buyers use to access their memories in a buying situation. 

New research by Clear Channel UK has highlighted that in order to assess what a business’s CEPs are, businesses must conduct some quantitative research. They recommend carrying out a survey of category buyers designed to uncover the common motivations and behaviours behind category entry. 

Once the CEPs are established, they recommend heading back into the field with another survey. This survey would present category buyers with the business’s CEPs and would ask the buyers which brands they associate with each.

With this data collected, businesses should be able to understand how much mental availability they have and how this compares to the competition, and how businesses might increase their mental availability compared to the competition. 

In their research, Clear Channel analysed four key metrics as outlined by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute:

• Mental penetration: The percentage of category buyers with at least one CEP link
• Mental market share: The brand’s share of all brand CEP links
• Network size: The average number of CEPs among category buyers with mental penetration
• Share of mind: The share of CEP links among category buyers with mental penetration.

These metrics enabled Clear Channel to gain clearer insight as to how customers were responding to businesses’ efforts to win them over and what the businesses analysed within the research needed to do to either grow or hold their position. 

In short order with mental availability, talk is cheap. Only action can help you win the fight for consumer attention.