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.
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Authoritative references