How brands are built: mental availability and distinctive brand assets

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Brands grow through availability, not loyalty

In How Brands Grow (2010) Byron Sharp condensed decades of Ehrenberg-Bass empirical work into one uncomfortable conclusion. Brands do not grow by loving their existing customers a little harder. They grow by acquiring more buyers, including the occasional and quite indifferent ones. For that they need two things. Physical availability, meaning being easy to find and buy. And mental availability: being what comes to mind the moment a buying situation arises.

Mental availability is not the same as awareness. That people know your brand is woefully little. What decides it is whether they think of it at the specific moment they need something.

Category entry points: the doors people come in through

Jenni Romaniuk (most recently in Better Brand Health, 2023) calls these moments category entry points. Beer is not bought in general. It is bought for a celebration, for the football, as a gift, for a thirst after mowing the lawn. Nor is B2B software bought in general: it is bought when a key person leaves, when the company scales, when an audit exposes a hole in the process. And each such situation works as a separate retrieval cue.

Big brands are linked to many entry points, small ones to one or two. The practical consequence suggests itself. Map the entry points in your category, measure where you are already associated and where there is nothing, and deliberately hang your communication on the points with the largest volume. This is what a mental availability strategy means, and it is a considerably more useful document than most brand manuals.

Distinctive assets: the marks people recognise

For associations to attach to the right brand at all, that brand has to be instantly recognisable. That is the job of distinctive brand assets, sensory elements acting as a signature: colour, shape, jingle, mascot, slogan, tone of voice. Milka's purple. McDonald's golden arches. The Michelin man. Intel's jingle. Locally, Kofola's Christmas piglet, running across screens for over twenty years, T-Mobile's magenta, or Alza's green alien, aesthetically debatable, mnemonically brilliant.

Romaniuk (Building Distinctive Brand Assets, 2018) scores assets on two axes. The first is fame, how many buyers know the element and link it to the brand. The second is uniqueness, how many of them link it exclusively to you. An element that is both famous and unique is an asset that belongs in every touchpoint. A unique element lacking fame is an investment opportunity. And an element half the market confuses with a competitor is a liability, however much anyone likes it.

Consistency is not nostalgia

Memory structures grow through repetition, which makes a brand's own marketing department its most dangerous enemy: new CMO, new agency, new visual. Being bored of it is a miserable reason to rebrand. You are sick of your own campaign long before most of the market has even noticed it. Kodak and Nokia did not die of an old jingle, they died of the product. Consistency applies to assets and position, not to freezing execution. Creative can change every year, as long as the signature stays.

How to run an asset audit: list the candidates (colours, shapes, characters, sounds, words) and test them quantitatively on category buyers. Show the elements without the logo and measure brand attribution alongside confusion with competitors. Then turn the result into rules on what to protect, what to build up and what to abandon. If you want it done properly, here is how we approach branding, or simply write to us.

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Sources: Byron Sharp, How Brands Grow (Oxford University Press, 2010) · Jenni Romaniuk, Building Distinctive Brand Assets (2018) and Better Brand Health (2023) · Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science.