Physical Availability

Definition

Physical Availability is one of two market-based assets (along with Mental Availability) that is vital for brand growth and which underpins the financial performance of a business.

Physical availability is the quality and the quantity of distribution points where a product or brand can be bought.

Physical availability means making a brand as easy to notice and buy as possible, for as many consumers as possible, across as wide a range of potential buying situations as possible.

It is split into three dimensions: presence, relevance and prominence.

Key Findings

The key marketing task is to make a brand easy to buy. This requires building physical availability, along with mental availability.
Decades of research into the patterns in buying behaviour and marketing metrics has led to the conclusion that brands compete for custom primarily in terms of physical, along with mental, availability.
Brands that are easier to buy, for more people in more occasions, get bought more often.
Differences in physical availability and consumers’ screening-out behaviour largely explains the vast and continuing market share differences that exist between even highly similar brands.
Physical availability is more than just retail penetration, but is also presence in store. It includes hours of availability and ease of facilitating the purchase.
Physical availability does not just mean “available to purchase if a consumer is sufficiently motivated to seek out the product and do so”. It means being readily available; always. Whenever and wherever a consumer may have the need.
The effects of distribution gains (in supermarkets) are far more pronounced in newer, smaller brands than in larger, established brands.

Presence – be present wherever products are bought
Involves decisions on where to place the brand, such as channel and retailer choice

multiple channel shopping is normal (regardless of the country). As more channel options become available, people add to the repertoire rather than totally substitute one channel for another.
Consumer choice for retailers largely mirrors the patterns of buying behaviour:
- buyers have repertoires of retailers and are rarely 100% loyal to one retailer, channel or store
- the relationship between penetration and loyalty to retailers reflects a double jeopardy pattern
- competition across retailers for shoppers follows the duplication of purchase law, i.e. retailers compete in line with the size of the competitor, sharing more shoppers with more popular retailers and fewer shoppers with the less popular retailers

Relevance – be relevant for whenever products may be used
Involves decisions about the portfolio options

Buyers are not 100% loyal to price points but select from a range of what is available

Prominence – be prominent wherever products are sought
Involves decisions about making the brand easily found in shopping environments

Shopping behaviour is quick in both traditional and online environments. Distinctive Brand Assets can help your brand to be seen in a cluttered shopping environment.

Best Practice

Report 64: The Fundamentals of Shopper Behaviour

Report 76: Physical Availability – What makes a brand easy to find & buy?

Thesis: How do disruptions to physical and mental availability of brands affect consumer behaviour?

Building physical availability requires breadth and depth of distribution in space and time.

Without Physical Availability, investments in Mental Availability are largely wasted.

Secondary display and eye-level shelf placement are measures of quality of physical availability. Weighted distribution, the number of facings a brand has on shelf and the number of buying points are metrics for quantity.

Presence – Be present wherever products are bought

Are you where you should be? How well do you cover places and times where category buying happens?

Coverage means reaching people in different locations. The accessibility of an outlet plays a more important role than its type.
Covering multiple retailers and channels builds physical availability as shoppers rarely shop at one outlet.
Do not only look at traditional outlets for your brand, consider the brand’s availability via e-commerce as this is a very fast-growing distribution channel.
Service brands need to distinguish between channels that sell and channels that service customers when assessing their brand’s physical availability.

Prominence – Be prominent wherever products are sought.

Are you easily found in shopping environments?

Be easy to find in all shopping environments. Whether that is within an outlet, on shelf or online

Distinctive Assets deal with clutter by helping brands stand out and be quickly found.

Use DAs everywhere and consistently; linking in-store with out of store. Check that your brand is distinctive (but not odd).

Avoid fragmenting your brand identity when launching variants.

Portfolio – Be relevant for whenever products may be used.

Are you buyable?

Managing your Portfolio is about creating a relevant product range across the category’s many buying occasions, balancing range with costs to prioritise options. Overcome any potential barriers to purchase.

Create a map of category variants to check the brand is buyable for most of the situations that any category buyer encounters.

Have options that cover all key price options, such as budget and premium options.

Reports (8)

Reports

Showing 8 results

How service channels build presence: evidence from banking

Report 119
July 2023

In service sectors, customers (in this context, users) can choose from a range of channels to access their providers, for example through websites, mobile applications, or brick-and-mortar branches. Providing access point options for customers requires sizeable investment by the service provider. This report aims to encourage evidence-based channel management decisions and provides some foundational documentation of how customers use channels in a service category (banking).

REPORT 107
February 2022

Activation (a misleading term; as is “performance marketing”) is trying to catch buyers as they buy from the category. Examples are price promotions, in-store displays, and paid search.
In contrast, advertising aims to shape the buying population’s mental availability for your brand. Some exposures occur just before a category purchase is made, some exposures occur just after, and many occur long before the consumer next buys (or before they are even category buyers).
In this report we look further into “activation” vs advertising, and explain why leaving all exposures to the last minute is a risk.

REPORT 97
APRIL 2020

Sometimes brands exhibit unusually high loyalty, with no apparent explanation. This is referred to as “excess loyalty”. In this report we show that it is likely to be an artefact of the brand being popular only in certain regions, channels, or stores. The phrase “excess loyalty” sounds good, but it often turns out to be better described as “deficit penetration”.

REPORT 94
JUNE 2019

We know that brands have many light buyers and few heavy, with the lightest 80% of any brand’s buyers contributing approximately half of that brand’s sales. Retailers similarly have many small baskets and few large baskets (light and heavy shoppers on a particular day), but we still don’t know how many sales they contribute.
This report analyses nine million US shopping trips to extend the Pareto principle to shopping baskets, and examines the importance of small and large baskets across different retailers.
We find that:
1) The smallest 80% of shopping baskets on average contribute 50% of retailer unit sales, and 60% of dollar revenue.
2) The distribution of shopping baskets follows an ‘inverse J’ shape - many small and few large. This is observed across a range of different retail types, from grocery stores to hardware stores. Store attractiveness depends substantially on servicing quick/short small basket shopping trips.

REPORT 80
APRIL 2018

Key Points
. Large brands have larger portfolios, but portfolio size norms depend on the category.
. The top-half of the product portfolio typically contributes eight out of ten brand buyers and 75% of the revenue.
. When deciding to add or remove SKUs, investigating how each SKU contributes incremental buyers along with sales to the overall brand is crucial.

Report 77
JANUARY 2018

Supermarkets provide physical availability for packaged goods brands. But not all in-store ‘real estate’ is equal, as shoppers do not visit every area of the store. Shoppers navigate a supermarket following some predictable patterns. As a result, some locations in-store are more desirable for marketers than others.

Report 76
DECEMBER 2017

Physical Availability is about making the brand easy to find and easy to buy. Brands need to be available in [all] the places and at the times that consumers think about buying the category. While consumers are naturally loyal, there are often multiple brands that are salient for a category need. If one of the Mentally Available brands is less easy to find or more difficult to buy than a rival brand, the consumer will likely buy the rival.

Vaccination Report
January 2016

Might consumers value a brand above highly similar rivals because of positive feelings toward the brand? This is a less extreme version of the idea of consumers falling in love with brands. Undoubtedly this sometimes happens due to personal idiosyncratic reasons (“this is the perfume I wore the day we met”) but can a brand evoke shared feelings across the whole market