I would love to get the Ehrenberg-Bass scientists point of view on the scope of Social Listening tools to effectively track and measure progress made on Brand Consideration, Mental Availability and understanding Brands’ Associative networks.

• We’re considering adopting a social media monitoring tool to help us understand:

• What people are saying about our brands

• Which of our memory assets contribute to distinctiveness and whether these are the aspects consumers are discussing

• Our category entry points and our ownership of them in terms of share of mentions

• How to measure mental availability

Given the principles of Mental Availability and the Laws outlined in “How Brands Grow” I’d like to know what key metrics we should monitor to assess if our brand is growing in awareness, consideration, and love, and what key questions the tool should answer to align with our strategic goals.

Firstly, I’ll preface by saying that social listening tools are great for some things, but have their limitations. They can be a great source of knowledge for identifying the new ways people are using your product/category, which can aid innovation and portfolio development. They can also be useful to track sentiment, and in particular, benchmark negative sentiment to identify jumps and shed light into the reasons behind these jumps. These uses can help growth efforts by giving you a finger on the pulse to issues that might hinder mental or physical availability (e.g. issues with distribution, barriers to purchase, new uses of the product) etc.

However, social listening data comes from a biased and incomplete sample of typically heavy category users, and we see extremes of positive and negative sentiments that don’t reflect the ‘norm’.

This makes it difficult to use social listening tools to understand Category Entry Points (CEPs), Mental Availability and distinctiveness. For example, for CEPs, you’ll likely pick up the unusual and shareable, rather than the typical, everyday occasions/contexts that bring the most buyers into the category. These CEPs will likely be less valuable. Moreover, social listening tools don’t allow you to look at buyers and non-buyers separately. We know that to grow, brands need to increase penetration especially of non-buyers. Tracking non-buyers on these metrics is important, and the heavy category users that talk online likely mean you don’t have a representative viewpoint. It’s also hard to know what you are measuring –  for example, with brand awareness, you don’t know the cue that stimulated the brand mention so you can’t be sure whether you’re measuring unaided or aided brand awareness (e.g. did the respondent type in a google search or are they responding to a post/comment that mentions the brand). As I mention below, one is more valuable than the other. With distinctiveness, while social listening tools may provide some insight into fame, another key aspect is uniqueness and social listening tools don’t allow you to be sure that people don’t link the asset to other brands as supposed to just not mentioning it online.

Therefore, we recommend measuring Mental Availability, CEPs and distinctiveness with consumer surveys from a representative sample of category buyers. We also don’t recommend measuring these metrics as frequently as social listening tools would allow. Mental Availability can be measured at an approximate, every year, (depending on the category and stability of the category) and attitude much less. Social listening tools can encourage too-frequent tracking of these metrics, that is unnecessary and risks the business reacting to results that might be transient. We offer both measurements for Mental Availability, CEPs and Distinctiveness at the institute, as well as help to integrate these metrics into existing brand health trackers. For more information on our Research Services click here.

With regard to key metrics to monitor Better Brand Health goes into much more detail but hopefully the below gives you a good starting point.

Brand awareness:
There are two main reasons for measuring brand awareness: category identification (e.g. to check if category buyers are aware the brand is a member of a specific category) and ease of retrieval (e.g. to assess how easily category buyers retrieve the brand from memory). As discussed in Better Brand Health, using brand awareness to measure the latter has limitations, as it doesn’t effectively capture how memory works; Mental Availability is a better capture of brand retrieval. Hence, I’ll focus on measuring brand awareness for category identification purposes.

There are three different measures of brand awareness: Top of Mind (TOM), spontaneous awareness (unprompted/unaided), and prompted/aided awareness. As I mentioned above, we know that non-buyers are a key part of a brand’s growth. Unfortunately, these three metrics are not equal when it comes to effectively capturing responses from non-buyers. TOM measures, especially, are difficult (they require the brand to be the first to be recalled given the category cue) and thus fewer responses come from non-buyers. Our recommendation for tracking brand awareness is to measure prompted brand awareness of the brand’s non-buyers. It’s important to note that prompted brand awareness does not easily erode, so collecting a benchmark for brand buyers and then ongoing tracking of non-buyers is sufficient.

Brand consideration:
Our recommendation for measuring brand consideration is to remember that buyers do not have one single consideration set that they always use to make decisions, but rather the set of brands they consider varies across time and contexts depending on the cue that is available. For this reason, we prefer the measure of Mental Availability, which captures the likelihood for a brand to come to mind (so it can be considered) across relevant purchase occasions. Mental Availability is a multi-cue measure of retrieval and helps to address some of the above concerns with unprompted awareness measures.

If you want to use a consideration measure, then capturing consideration ‘post decision’ may be more effective than a ‘pre-decision’. For example, it may be more insightful to ask consumers which brand(s) they purchased (or which retailers they visited) and which other ones they considered, rather than ‘which brands/retailers would you consider’. This shifts the purpose of the measure away from retrieval.

Brand love:
When measuring brand love, I presume the assumption is that this is more desirable and important to strive for than someone just ‘knowing of’ the brand – eg brand lovers will have a higher propensity to buy the brand. In Better Brand Health, we talk about a few challenges with this viewpoint, e.g., by showing that few people hold these extreme attitudes; that often attitudes reflect behaviour rather than drive it; and that buyers often do not need to hold a positive attitude to start/continue buying a brand. Reflecting these findings, when we plan brand attitude questions (brand love being an attitude), we recommend having a question that measures buyers and non-buyers’ full spectrum of attitudes towards the brand – e.g. positive, negative and neutral. In particular, we recommend benchmarking the distribution of responses for buyers and non-buyers, and checking it’s normal for a brand your size and within your category (NB brand attitude scores follow a Double Jeopardy pattern, where big brands have a slightly higher attitude score than smaller brands a slightly smaller score). In addition, check brand rejection scores for both buyers and non-buyers are low and inline with competitors, and identify any reasons for rejection. This will be much more useful for diagnosing issues than striving for brand love.

R.F.
20 March 2025

I’d be interested to know the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute’s point of view on big brands versus the total number of brands purchased. I suspect that big brands have significantly more light and occasional buyers, which in turn lowers the average number of brands purchased – due to big brands having greater mental and physical availability.

Yes indeed, this is a manifestation of the Natural Monopoly (NM) effect.
Way back in the 1960’s, it was discovered that “the most popular alternatives in a category were strongest among people who knew the least” (about the category) – in other words, light buyers.

Big brands get to be big because they’ve done better at reaching the mass population; if a light buyers knows anything about that category it will be the biggest brand, whereas the people who know (or buy) smaller brands also know more brands (so, lower loyalty toward the small brand).
So yes, market leading brands tend to unduly attract lighter category buyers, (and they tend to dominate their requirements, ie high Share of Category  Requirements) which means buyers of the big brand tend to buy fewer other brands.

I wrote a paper on this, which can be found here: “The Natural Monopoly effect in brand purchasing: do big brands really appeal to lighter category buyers?”

J.D.
20 March 2025

Are metrics like TOMA (Top of Mind Awareness) a good predictor of actual performance in the market?

I’d like to know your thoughts regarding the relationship between Brand Health Metrics (like, Top of Mind Awareness, Brand Power, Kantar) and market off-take. Quite often, I have seen that these relationships are inverse – so, the stated intentions (as stated in Brand Health Tracks) and the actual behaviour (as reflected by market off-take) are not in tandem and brands gaining market share are losing TOMA and vice versa. So, are metrics like TOMA a good predictor of actual performance in the market?

The association between top-of-mind, sales, sales growth, and then Kantar metrics is not straightforward.

In cross-section, yes there is a strong relationship between sales and top of mind: big brands have more awareness – some of that is from usage (users of a brand are almost certain to score + on TOM; and also among non-users.  So, this does tell us that you can’t be a big brand unless you have high awareness.

And Kantar brand power metrics are also associated cross-sectionally with sales (bigger brands score more).

We usually see that as brands grow, metrics like TOM also grow but at the same time – it doesn’t seem to be case that TOM is a well-behaved ‘lead indicator’ of sales growth – I’ve tried to analyse heaps of data to see if it works like that.

We feel that TOMA tends to be a backwards-looking measure and that mental market share (made up of the brand’s share of the relevant ‘Category Entry Points’ ) is a better metric to monitor for growth.

J.D
3 February 2025

We are launching a limited edition pack with another brand, how do you suggest we design our packaging? Should our brand feature theirs more? For further context they are coming into our category and will be more a new flavour, but will have its own range for a limited time.

Quite simply your brand should feature prominently on the limited-edition packaging as its your category not theirs. But here’s why you must aim to keep your brand the star:

• Reinforce Mental Availability: Consistent use of your brand’s Distinctive Assets: such as logo, colours, and fonts, ensures consumers can easily identify your product in the future. Even in a collaboration, your brand must feature as you do not want to run the risk of confusing consumers or adding more mental structures. Thus, creating competition with yourself in memory.
• Leverage Brand Recognition: If your brand is more well-known, emphasising it will likely boost the product’s appeal. If the partner brand is stronger in certain markets, their logo can still be prominent, but not at the expense of your key assets. Remember they are coming into your category, and you would like anyone who trials the product to possible also buy your products once this limited edition is gone. Consumers cannot do this if they think it’s the partner brands product.
• Remember Distinctiveness Over Differentiation: Recognisable branding helps your product stand out on shelves. Ensure the packaging aligns with your existing range, making the limited edition feel like a natural extension rather than an entirely new product.
• Physical Availability Considerations: Retailers and consumers need to quickly identify your brand. Keeping your brand elements front and centre ensures continuity and avoids confusion at the point of sale. If you would like to feature the partner brand more on the display (to keep the retailer or partner brand happy) you can do this, but ensure what consumers buy and take home your brand is the feature.

With dual branding we often find only one brands wins, so design the packaging so that your brand is the focal point, while still giving adequate but secondary visibility to the partner brand.

W.C
12 November 2024

What work has been done to demonstrate with xx% increase in media + activation + distribution etc, you get xx% PEN. The question behind the question is how can we catapult our PEN Growth over the next 3 years for our small and medium sized brands?

This is a good question. There isn’t a set algorithm or formula like this unfortunately. The main thing to think about is that Mental Availability and Physical Availability work best when they overlap. So, if you have any shortcomings on Physical Availability, fix that first then work to build Mental Availability. Or, if it’s low Mental Availability but your metrics on PA are excellent, then work to fix the weakness on MA. Next thing is, it’s not saying anything new but if your goal is to significantly increase penetration of small and medium brands you have to resist the urge to ‘spend big’ now to get some momentum going – sounds great but then you run out of $$ for 6- or 12-months time. So, spread spending out as far as possible, spread it across time and across media to achieve maximum reach.

Probably the marketing mix variable with strongest correlation to growth / penetration is distribution so if you have items with say, 30% distribution then pushing that figure up will work better than spending more on media, for example. And yes, activation can buy sales, but it tends to be a short term fix, as soon as you stop then the extra sales stop too.

J.D
21 October 2024

I’m curious about the pros/cons of pursuing multi-brand channels vs O&O?

When building Physical Availability and Mental Availability across category buyers (and potential category buyers), we need to focus on reach.

So the important advantage for pursuing multi-brand channels is the fact that we can reach potential brand buyers who may not have our brand name as the major cue, i.e., looking for a specific product regardless of who makes them. The disadvantage would be the lack of control — as consumers can compare against products easily (on price, feature, etc.).

The opposite is likely for O&O — the advantage is the full control of the channel as there is no competitor interference. If the O&O is established in the market, one may argue that the channel has a substantial reach across category and potential category buyers in the market, however, it remains that the dominant cue in consumer accessing the channel to buy the brand would be the brand name. In digital, this may be remedied by having concerted activities to capture key search terms, requiring continuous investment and control.

So, the main criteria to assess multi-brand channels vs O&O should predominantly be on its reach / penetration-building capability — against the cost to service/establish our brand in the channel.

A.T
12 Sept. 2024

Product branding vs parent branding: how to approach multiple product lines/naming extensions?

Obviously, each tactic has their own advantages and disadvantages. Incorporating parent branding enables the product to leverage on the Mental Availability and the Distinctive Assets of the parent brand. Consumers will already have some knowledge of the parent brand and thus can build new links to the new product – rather than thinking that the product is introduced by a newcomer in the market. This would also mean leveraging on the parent brand’s strengths – as well as weaknesses. It is easier for consumers to link the products to the parent brand as well rather than necessarily having to learn about the product ownership, if it is branded independently.

The weaknesses as discussed above obviously can be addressed through “product branding” that does not take advantage of the parent branding — so that it stands alone and free to establish fresh links on consumers’ mind as well as build its own Distinctive Assets. This would mean that it can be outvoiced by the bigger brands, especially if the product branding does not contain any links to or any of the parent brand’s distinctive assets. Consumers will have to learn that the product is backed by one of the bigger brands so that it’s not a totally new brand. Having the product branded independently would give more freedom in branding, Distinctive Assets, and positioning – however, it is a tougher route to take due to the investment needed to build a set of independent rules to the product vs the brand.

A.T.
20 May 2024

When you advise to check that the redesign does not reduce Fame and Uniqueness of shopping assets, how would we test Fame in our research?

The first step is to understand what your shopping assets are? For example doing a Distinctive Asset study and determining the Fame and mental competitors of each of these assets that are used on packaging. Next is to only change what consumers do not use to shop for the brand (if required). This approach helps maintain Fame, causing less confusion. Or, if you are launching a limited edition, allows you to understand what represents the brand.

Fame is a measure of how many people know the brand out of the total market. So it really depends how you want to test this. There are numerous way to test the design to measure Fame.

One way is using an unprompted approach (like we test assets). I would take off the logo from the pack and ask how many people know what brand your concepts are linked to. This is the most simple way, but after understanding what your shopping assets are it will become clear what concept might perform better. In all testing always include the old packaging that is being replaced to benchmark against.

W.C.
2 April 2024

Consistent presence – how should we think of this in conjunction with memory decay? How do we identify how long we can afford to be off? Are there indicators we can use as proxies? How might this be different or similar for seasonal brands? 

Memory creation and decay have been studied for hundreds of years. A classic study showed memory has a “saw-tooth” shape when graphed over time: a fast rise followed by slow decay (Zielske, 1959). Recall of a print ad (proven category-cued ad recall) declined from 14% to 3% after 3 weeks, suggesting that the same person needs to be exposed to advertising at least once a month to maintain and gradually build memory. A meta-analysis of 100 years of psychological research suggests that recall and recognition decay at the same rate, although recognition declines from a higher base (Rubin & Wenzel, 1996). Visual recognition declines from the highest base, almost 100%, and so after a week can still be higher than 90% (Venkatraman et al., 2021). Visual recognition is stronger than verbal recognition (e.g., Haber, 1970; Snodgrass et al., 1972), or any form of recall. 

If the purpose of the ad is to promote visual pack recognition in the store, you shouldn’t have to advertise as often compared to if the purpose was to have people recall a brand name before visiting the store or searching online. I’m not sure exactly what you mean by proxy indicators for memory. Ad recall and recognition are easily measured using tracking and brand health surveys. But a drop in sales could be an indicator of a drop in Mental Availability, due to the brand going dark (Hartnett et al., 2021; Phua et al., 2023). The Institute recommends that seasonal brands (e.g., summer or winter brands) advertise more during their season. However, if the brand has not gone entirely dark during the off-season, less advertising will be needed to restore the brand’s target level of Mental Availability (e.g., more than 50% of potential customers can recognise seeing ads showing the pack). 

References

• Zielske, H. A. (1959). The remembering and forgetting of advertising. Journal of Marketing, 23(3), 239-243
• Rubin, D. C. & Wenzel, A. E. (1996). One hundred years of forgetting: A quantitative description of retention. Psychological Review, 103(4), 734-760
• Venkatraman, V., Dimoka, A., Vo, K., Pavlou, P. A. (2021). Relative effectiveness of print and digital advertising: A memory perspective. Journal of Marketing Research, 58(5), 827-844
• Haber, R. N. (1970). How we remember what we see. Scientific American, 222(5), 104-112
• Snodgrass, J. G., Volvovitz, R., Walfish, E R (1972). Recognition memory for words, pictures, and words + pictures. Psychonomic Science, 27(6), 345-347
• Hartnett, N., Gelzinis, A., Beal, V., Kennedy, R., Sharp, B. (2021). When brands go dark: Examining sales trends when brands stop broad-reach advertising for long periods. Journal of Advertising Research, 61(3), 247-259
• Phua, P., Hartnett, N., Beal, V., Trinh, G., Kennedy, R. (2023). When brands go dark: A replication and extension. Journal of Advertising Research, 63(2), 172-184 

S.B.
14 March 2024

How much Mental Availability impact could you attribute to a Physical Availability activation?

The team wants to use a sizeable part of their marketing budget to fund a ‘pop up store’. Think of those temporary stores in the middle of a walkway inside a shopping centre. They are looking for guidance on what part of that spend they could attribute to growing Mental Availability as it’s both to sell product but to also bring awareness to the brand in a public space. My instant reaction is ‘none, this is about Physical Availability, sales driving initiative not a brand building one’. I would put this money into media investment instead, as I believe it will be a better return in both long and short term. I want to get back to them with an unbiased and evidence-based response.

Firstly, I’ll try to give you some explanation/insight in shorter terms:

In a nutshell, I agree with you that a pop-up would build more Physical than Mental Availability. Activations work by catching buyers when they are interested in buying from the category. Not everyone is ‘in the market’ all the time, so they only reach the buyers that are. Depending on the activation, this may be restricted further – e.g., to buyers in a particular shopping mall, like your team is thinking about with the pop-up store. The aim with activations is to get more of your share of buyers that are interested in the category at that time (for your market share). You’re unlikely to convert people not interested in the category in that moment (they will likely screen it out and not notice it), but you try to capture and convert those who are.

In contrast, Mental Availability efforts (like media, as you said) aim to build the population’s chances of thinking about your brand and noticing it (on the shelf but also activations/Physical Availability efforts). As your team suggests, some exposures that build Mental Availability can occur just before a purchase, e.g., from activation efforts. However, most occur long before a consumer makes a purchase. The objective is that when someone enters a buying situation, your brand is one of the few that is noticed/comes to mind. This means that activations depend very little on the actual activation, but mostly on how many people notice or think of them. In this sense, Mental Availability reaches more buyers (including non-buyers), and establishes a memory for the brand that can optimise the effectiveness of other efforts (e.g., whether activations are noticed).

So, pop-ups and Mental Availability efforts have different objectives and reach different people. While pop-ups may contribute a little bit to building Mental Availability, this will only be in a small number of buyers (e.g., those who are in buying mode); Mental Availability is built much more by other, wider reaching efforts that are mainly outside of purchase situations.

With regard to the impact of a pop-up store on Mental Availability, this corporate report discusses why this is so difficult to judge. It goes over a bit of what I’ve mentioned above, but also emphasises that because activations enable purchase (physical) availability, they always need to be on.

“Activation” vs Advertising

The media principles report is also a good read to help in terms of how to schedule advertising between category purchases:

BEST PRACTICE: Ehrenberg-Bass Institute Key Media Principles

R.F.
29 January 2024