In a recent article, we made a case for mental availability: a key brand growth metric that, while often overlooked, is a powerful framework for identifying and executing growth opportunities. To recap, mental availability reflects the likelihood that a brand comes to mind in buying situations and therefore influences choice.
All brands benefit from measuring and optimizing their mental availability. But there is no one-size-fits-all approach for growth; your optimal growth strategy depends on your brand’s size, current positioning, and growth priorities.
What’s promising about mental availability as a growth framework is that it can be applied in various ways to address the needs of different brand types. Let’s dive into the nuances.
Different needs, different priorities
Mental availability has two distinct but complementary dimensions:
Mental penetration (depth): how many consumers think of a brand in a given buying occasion.
Mental network size (breadth): the number of buying occasions in which consumers think of a brand.
Market leaders typically enjoy broad mental networks. Consumers likely already associate them with a wide range of buying occasions, need states, and consumption patterns. For such brands, the growth opportunities often lie in deepening mental penetration by strengthening brand recall across those existing occasions, as well as increasing the likelihood that the brand is top of mind and, ultimately, chosen more often.
Challenger brands face a different reality: lower market penetration, lower overall awareness, and a more niche positioning compared to category leaders (who have a broader, more balanced image profile). Consumers may associate challenger brands with fewer Category Entry Points (CEPs). They also may think of these brands on a narrower set of occasions. Which isn’t to say that challenger brands don’t come to mind in buying occasions: the limitation here is that these brands typically only compete for a small portion of total category demand.
Growth opportunities are often constrained for challenger brands when they focus solely on increasing consideration within the occasions or CEPs they already own. Each CEP has a finite size, so even with a significant improvement in penetration, the total growth potential remains limited by the number of purchase opportunities that CEP represents. Winning more often in the same CEPs can deliver incremental gains, but it might not be enough to drive real growth.
On the bright side, expanding mental network size proves fruitful as it increases the number of opportunities for the brand to be considered. Each new CEP creates an additional route to purchase, creating access to incremental category demand that was previously unavailable. Challenger brands should thus focus on building new mental links across a greater range of buying situations, consumption moments, and need states. The objective here isn’t to simply increase associations with the CEPs the brand already owns, but to increase the number of occasions the brand is brought to mind.
One of our global clients in the beverages category leveraged this approach to significantly and quickly grow a small brand in their portfolio in strategic European and North American markets. The goal was to move from a low-awareness, niche positioning to rise as a key player in „get together“ CEPs, which were historically dominated by category-leader competitors. With targeted, locally relevant media plans, and a communications platform highlighting the premiumness and versatile uses of the brand, our client expanded its presence in those CEPs, significantly growing their brand equity and usage and becoming a category player to contend with.
Strategic implications for challenger brands
For challenger brands, marketing, innovation, and communication strategies should be designed to do the following:
Identify high-potential CEPs that are underdeveloped or currently dominated by larger competitors
Build distinctive assets and communications that link the brand to those new occasions
Expand the range of situations in which consumers naturally think of the brand (rather than concentrating solely on existing ones)
Mental availability is a versatile framework as it doesn’t prescribe a single path to growth. Its value is best unlocked by lifting the levers that work best for brands based on their current position. Where leaders generally benefit from strengthening mental penetration, challengers will find greater growth opportunities by expanding their mental network size. The key is to understand which dimension(s) matter most for your brand and leverage mental availability as needed to drive growth.
Author: Helene Pavlidis
Global Commercial Director – Brand & Creative at Toluna
Helene is a market research leader with over 15 years of experience in the Brand & Creative research space, with experience working across Europe and the US. She has always been passionate about helping brands build stronger growth and impactful communications through actionable insights and cutting-edge research. Her role focuses on accompanying and advising clients on their Brand and Creative decisions, ensuring Toluna consistently delivers the highest-value research excellence.
