Glossary · Marketing Strategy
Mental Availability
also: brand salience · Ehrenberg-Bass
Definition
Mental availability is the propensity of a brand to be thought of in buying situations. It is a network property across the category's entry points, not a single recall score, and is the dominant predictor of market share according to Ehrenberg-Bass research.
Coined by Romaniuk and Sharp at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, mental availability separates itself from awareness and recall by conditioning on context: not 'do you know the brand?' but 'does the brand come to mind when you're thirsty/hungry/shopping?' Large brands are large primarily because they are linked to more Category Entry Points than small brands, not because they have stronger links to individual CEPs.
Essays on this concept
- Marketing Strategy
Category Entry Points: A Quantitative Approach to Byron Sharp's Mental Availability Theory
Brands don't compete for preference. They compete for mental availability — being thought of in the buying situation. Category Entry Points are the specific occasions, needs, and contexts that trigger category thoughts. Most brands measure the wrong ones.
- Marketing Strategy
Brand vs. Performance: A Portfolio Optimization Framework Using Markowitz Theory for Marketing Budget Allocation
Finance solved the allocation problem in 1952. Marketing still argues about it in 2026. Markowitz's portfolio theory — applied to marketing channels instead of stocks — reveals an efficient frontier that makes the brand-versus-performance debate quantitatively resolvable.
- Marketing Engineering
The Hidden Cost of Optimization: How Over-Fitted Algorithms Destroy Long-Term Brand Equity
Your bidding algorithm gets better every quarter. Your brand gets weaker every year. This is not a coincidence — it's Goodhart's Law applied to marketing, and the compounding damage is invisible until it's too late.
- Marketing Engineering
Marketing Mix Modeling in the Privacy-First Era: Bayesian Structural Time Series Without User-Level Data
Cookies are dying. Deterministic attribution is shrinking. The irony: the measurement approach from the 1960s — Marketing Mix Modeling — is making a comeback, now powered by Bayesian inference that would have been computationally impossible when it was first invented.
Related concepts
Authoritative references