How the Ehrenberg-Bass revolution is changing the way we think about brand performance, and how the Stat & More approach enables empirical quantification of mental availability and the strength of distinctive assets.
Measuring what makes a brand mentally available
For the past twenty years, a body of work from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, popularised notably by Byron Sharp and Jenni Romaniuk, has profoundly reshaped our understanding of brand performance. At the heart of this school of thought are two closely related concepts: mental availability and distinctive brand assets.
Mental availability refers to the probability that a brand comes to mind when a consumer has a need in the category. Unlike static awareness measured out of context, it is a dynamic, situational and competitive form of awareness: it operates at every purchase occasion, at the intersection between environmental stimuli and the consumer’s associative memory.
A brand’s distinctive elements are the sensory, visual or verbal cues (colours, typefaces, sounds, characters, packaging, slogans, patterns, etc.) that uniquely “sign” the brand and make it instantly recognisable. They are the fuel of mental availability: they activate the brand in memory at the crucial moment, without requiring effortful cognitive processing.
Four mechanisms structure this system:
- distinctiveness, the ability of a cue to be ownable and unique to the brand,
- unaided recall,
- the cueing process, activation of the brand by a stimulus,
- and fluent recognition.
This article details each of these mechanisms, shows how they interrelate, and presents how the Stat & More approach, with its uniqueness and richness scores and its LDA modelling of associative patterns, operationalises them to produce an actionable diagnostic.
Why mental availability changes the game
A strong brand is not the one that is most liked in absolute terms. It is the one that comes to mind first, in the right context, at the right time.
The traditional marketing approach largely rested on the idea of a stable preference: consumers would have “their” favourite brand, to which they would remain loyal as long as nothing broke the relationship. Work from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute has empirically challenged this assumption. Based on large-scale observations across dozens of categories and markets, these researchers have shown that most buyers do not have a single preferred brand but rather a repertoire of brands from which they choose depending on occasions, contexts and environmental stimuli.
From this perspective, gaining market share is less about “converting” loyal competitors’ customers than about increasing the probability of being chosen by as many buyers as possible, on as many occasions as possible. This is achieved through two main levers: physical availability (being present in stores, online, in purchase contexts) and mental availability (coming to mind at the moment of decision).
This logic has two major practical implications. On the one hand, it values broad reach, including occasional buyers and non-customers, rather than highly targeted approaches focused on a loyal niche. On the other hand, it emphasises distinctive codes, what the brand “is” sensorially, rather than persuasive messages alone. A brand whose codes are strongly recognised and strongly linked to the brand enjoys a measurable and sustainable competitive advantage, regardless of the intensity of its media pressure.
Mental availability: awareness in situation
Mental availability measures how easily a brand is mentally “recalled” in a purchase or consumption situation. It differs from simple awareness in its situational and competitive nature.
Context-dependent awareness
A brand can be very well known in absolute terms (aided awareness at 90%) but weakly mentally available because few everyday environmental stimuli activate it. Conversely, a less well-known brand can be highly mentally available in a specific context because it is strongly associated with usage situations, times of day, functional benefits or specific emotions.
This is why mental availability is measured through category entry points (CEPs), the multiple mental entry points through which the category is activated. The more CEPs a brand is associated with, the more likely it is to be thought of when the need arises. This “by occasion” logic usefully replaces the idea of abstract, out-of-context awareness.
The two pillars of the Ehrenberg-Bass model
Mental availability rests on two pillars, strongly documented by empirical research.
- First, the brand norm in memory (norm-based memory): to what extent is the brand part of a consumer’s “default” mental landscape?
- Second, the richness of contextual associations: how many different environmental stimuli activate the brand, and with what strength?
These two pillars explain why market leaders almost always dominate the mental territory of their category: they are “by default” in memory, and activated by a large number of usage situations. This is what researchers call the double jeopardy: mentally less available brands suffer a double disadvantage: fewer buyers, and fewer occasions per buyer.
Strategic implications
These insights overturn several traditional reflexes. To maximise mental availability, brands should aim for broad mental coverage rather than a deep niche, prioritise memorable and coherent campaigns over fragmented micro-targeting, and invest heavily in the consistency of distinctive codes. This is an “anti-loyalty” logic in the sense that it challenges the obsession with retention in favour of broad mental conquest.
Distinctive brand assets: what “signs” the brand
Distinctive brand assets are the sensory codes that make a brand immediately recognisable and mentally activatable, without requiring effortful cognitive processing. Colours, typefaces, shapes, sounds, jingles, characters, mascots, packaging, slogans, signature gestures, etc.: any element that “stands for” the brand in collective memory is part of this repertoire.
The role of a mental shortcut
The role of distinctive brand assets is to create a mental shortcut. Instead of having to read a name, process a message or decode an intention, the brain instantly associates a cue with a brand. This cognitive economy is decisive in two types of contexts: cluttered environments (retail shelves, digital feeds, advertising boards) where attention is fragmented, and fast decisions (low-involvement purchases, express comparisons, mobile scrolling) where processing time is minimal.
A few examples illustrate the power of these assets. The red colour of the KitKat wafer, Nike’s swoosh logo, the shape of the Coca-Cola bottle, the M&M’s characters, Netflix’s “ta-dum”, the characteristic “plop” sound of opening a Bledina baby food jar, or the characteristic “pschitt” of opening a Perrier bottle: all function as universal signatures, capable of activating the brand without its name even being spoken or read.
Assets that are not decorative
The essential point is that these assets are not decorative. They are not an aesthetic luxury for marketing departments, but a genuine lever of commercial performance. Ehrenberg-Bass research documents that a brand with a strong repertoire of distinctive brand assets gains market share at equal media pressure, because it amortises its creative investments more effectively in the memory of its targets.
This effectiveness is multiplied in the digital environment, where formats are short, attention spans are short and messages are drowned in noise. A brand whose codes are recognised within fractions of a second has a major competitive advantage over one that must, at every exposure, “remind people who it is” before it can convey anything else.
Distinctiveness: standing out to exist
Distinctiveness is the primary quality of a good distinctive asset. It measures the extent to which a cue (whether visual, auditory or verbal) is ownable to a brand and clearly differentiates it from competitors and from category norms.
Multiple levels of operation
The literature describes distinctiveness as a multi-level phenomenon. At the pre-attentive level, a distinctive asset attracts the eye or captures the ear even before the consumer is aware of having seen or heard it. At the semantic level, it establishes a strong and unambiguous link between the cue and the brand. At the memorial level, it facilitates encoding and subsequent recall, by anchoring itself as a robust point in market memory.
An asset can be highly visible without being distinctive (because it is shared by the entire category), or conversely very distinctive without being highly visible (because it is underused in communication). The real strength of an asset lies at the intersection of these two qualities: a cue that is both unique to the brand and actively present in its communication and product ecosystem.
Assessing distinctiveness in practice
In practice, distinctiveness is assessed through association tests: a cue (an image fragment, a sound, a colour, a slogan) is presented and the respondent is asked which brand comes to mind. The percentage of correct responses, compared to the percentage attributed to competing brands, provides an uniqueness score for the asset.
Leading brands typically have three to five major distinctive assets, forming a coherent and mutually reinforcing repertoire. This repertoire constitutes strategic capital that must be maintained, legally protected, and evolved cautiously, without abrupt changes that would destroy years of memory investment.
Unaided recall: the brand recalled without help
Unaided recall is the consumer’s ability to spontaneously remember a brand without external aid. It is at the heart of mental availability because it measures the brand norm in long-term memory.
Traditionally, unaided recall (unaided, top-of-mind, other spontaneous recalls) is distinguished from aided recall, even though in the Ehrenberg-Bass logic, the true marker of mental availability is contextual recall, i.e. recall triggered by category or situational environmental stimuli, rather than by an abstract out-of-context question.
The role of distinctive assets in unaided recall
Distinctive assets are major accelerators of unaided recall. A jingle, an iconic logo, a recurring character or memorable packaging create strong memory traces that make the brand more accessible. The richer and better integrated the repertoire of distinctive assets, the more entry points the brand has to be recalled.
This is why Ehrenberg-Bass studies observe a direct correlation between the strength of unaided recall and market share: brands that dominate market memory also dominate sales, because they are activated more often in more decision moments.
Unaided recall as a trend indicator
In tracking, unaided recall is an indicator particularly sensitive to creative renewals and media pressure. A decline typically signals erosion of mental presence, either through lack of advertising content or dilution of codes. An increase validates the effectiveness of a new creative wave or contextual activation.
For multi-brand analyses, unaided recall also allows competitors to be ranked within consumers’ actual mental territory, which can differ significantly from traditional aided awareness rankings.
Cueing: the brand triggered by a signal
Cueing is the mechanism by which an environmental stimulus (visual, auditory, contextual, situational, etc.) activates the brand in memory. It is the key mechanism linking distinctive assets to mental availability: without cueing, an asset may exist in the abstract but never be activated in real situations.
How cueing operates
Seeing a segmented red bar on packaging immediately brings KitKat to mind. Hearing the first notes of the Intel jingle immediately brings Intel to mind. Spotting a stylised equestrian silhouette immediately brings Hermès to mind. Reading a short, recognised slogan immediately brings the owning brand to mind. In all these cases, brand activation occurs without conscious effort, through sheer associative strength.
The power of cueing rests on the automaticity of the associative link. The more immediate and unambiguous the connection between the signal and the brand, the higher the mental availability. Conversely, an asset that requires effortful decoding to be attributed to the brand loses much of its value in fast situations.
Cueing in cluttered environments
Cueing takes on particular importance in cluttered environments. In-store, distinctive packaging activates the brand before the consumer has even read its name: this is what captures attention on a shelf with dozens of similar references. On a mobile screen, the app icon, the colour of a thumbnail or the typical layout of an ad format play the same role in flows where attention lasts only fractions of a second.
This logic has a strong operational consequence: distinctive assets must be ubiquitous and consistent across all touchpoints. An asset present in advertising but absent from packaging, or vice versa, cannot fully perform its cueing function. Multi-channel consistency is a strategic imperative here, not a graphic nicety.
Testing cueing effectiveness
Cueing tests measure this effectiveness through brief exposure to an asset, followed by an association question. Response speed, success rate and unambiguous nature constitute the main indicators. Brands with strong cueing perform better in “unplanned choice moments”, situations where the consumer had not anticipated the decision and must rely on what comes to mind.
Recognition: the brand identified fluently
Recognition is the ability to identify a brand when it is presented. Less demanding than recall, which requires active memory production, recognition relies on simple familiarity and processing fluency.
A different cognitive mechanism
The distinction between recall and recognition is rooted in cognitive psychology. Recall is a retrieval process “from scratch”: from an abstract cue (the category, the need), the brand name must be produced. Recognition, by contrast, is a judgment task: “do I know this cue?”. It is less cognitively costly and more stable over time.
Distinctive assets excel in recognition because they create a pre-attentive signature: the consumer “knows” they know the brand without having to mobilise processing effort. This processing fluency is itself associated with a positive bias: what is processed fluently is judged more credible, more familiar, more likeable, even in the absence of explicit emotional attachment.
A crucial metric in fast-choice contexts
Recognition is particularly important in fast-choice contexts: routine purchases, mobile navigation, express in-store comparisons. A well-recognised brand enjoys an automatic advantage, which translates into a higher choice probability even at equivalent stated intention.
In research, recognition is tested through brand-image association tasks, response timing, or identification confidence measurement. Combined with recall, it provides a complete view of mental availability: recall for spontaneous salience, recognition for robustness and processing fluency. Leading brands combine both dimensions at a high level, giving them a mental dominance that is particularly difficult to dislodge.
The virtuous loop linking the concepts
Distinctiveness, unaided recall, cueing and recognition are not isolated concepts. They chain together in a virtuous loop that constitutes the very mechanics of mental availability.
Distinctiveness produces assets unique to the brand. As these assets are disseminated, they facilitate stimulus in situation: they trigger the brand in a large number of contexts. This repeated stimulus reinforces recall (the brand is recalled more often and more easily) and recognition (it is identified more quickly and more fluently). In turn, high recall and recognition increase purchase probability. And each purchase (each exposure to packaging, product experience, repeated usage) reinforces the associations between assets and the brand, and thus perceived distinctiveness.
It is this loop that explains the enduring superiority of brands with a rich repertoire of distinctive assets: they benefit from cumulative reinforcement effects that competitors struggle to catch up with, even at equal or greater media pressure. This is also why breaking distinctive codes (radical identity redesign, abandoning established mascots or slogans, brutal creative repositioning) is a high-risk decision: it interrupts this loop and forces the brand to patiently rebuild what had sedimented over years.
Measuring mental availability: the Stat & More approach
Measuring mental availability and the strength of distinctive assets is not just about counting unaided recalls. It requires a specific methodological setup, combining association tests, attribution tests, analyses of associative patterns and advanced statistical modelling.
At Stat & More, we have developed a structured approach around two complementary scores, uniqueness and richness, combined with LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) modelling of associative patterns.
The uniqueness score: measuring distinctiveness
The uniqueness score quantifies the distinctiveness of a given asset (an image, a cue, a visual fragment, a slogan). Conceptually, it measures the extent to which this asset is associated with a single brand in consumers’ minds, rather than with several competitors or the generic category.
The higher the score, the stronger the asset is as a brand sign. A low uniqueness score indicates a generic asset (for example a colour shared by several competitors, or a visual code common to the entire category): it may be pleasant, even identity-bearing for the brand, but it does not function as a true distinctive asset in the Ehrenberg-Bass sense.
This score is particularly useful for arbitrating a repertoire: which assets deserve to be amplified? Which should be consolidated? Which are being diluted by imitating competitors? Which, finally, have never truly gained uniqueness and should be abandoned in favour of more profitable investments?
The richness score: repertoire density
The richness score extends this logic at the overall brand level. It quantifies the density of the distinctive asset repertoire: how many strong distinctive elements does the brand possess, and with what depth?
A brand may have a single extremely strong asset (an iconic logo, for example) but a poor repertoire otherwise. Another may benefit from a rich repertoire (several visual, auditory, verbal, behavioural codes) all moderately distinctive but cumulatively effective. Richness captures this dimension of thickness and orchestration of the repertoire.
The strategic interest is twofold: richness measures the brand’s resilience (the occasional loss of an asset is not catastrophic if the overall repertoire is dense), and it also measures its multi-channel activation capacity (the richer the repertoire, the more the brand can be mobilised in varied contexts).
Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) modelling of associative patterns
Beyond synthetic scores, we employ Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) modelling techniques to explore the latent structure of consumer associations. Initially developed for text analysis, LDA identifies the underlying themes or patterns in a large corpus of brand-attribute, brand-situation or brand-sensory environmental stimulus associations.
Concretely, this approach maps the major associative territories mobilised by consumers, identifying those where the brand is dominant, those where it is in open competition, and those where it is absent. It also allows prediction of future mental availability from the current structure of associative patterns, by spotting emerging vulnerability zones or mental conquest opportunities.
This modelling is particularly powerful for guiding creative and media choices: it enables briefs to be grounded in fine-grained knowledge of what is already established, what needs consolidating, and what remains to be conquered in market memory.
Tracking, strategic applications and limits
Longitudinal asset tracking
As with classic “brand health”, these metrics take on their full value in a longitudinal logic. A uniqueness or richness score does not have the same meaning if it has been stable for three years, continuously improving, or rapidly deteriorating. Tracking enables early detection of asset erosion, competitor imitation, or the benefits of a new creative wave.
Coupled with classic “brand health” metrics (awareness, consideration, usage), tracking distinctiveness and richness provides a 360° view of brand health, integrating the cognitive and sensory dimension often absent from traditional trackings.
Strategic applications
Operational implications are multiple. On the creative side, uniqueness and richness scores help arbitrate between different directions: which direction best reinforces the existing repertoire? Which element deserves to be systematised? On the media side, they help direct pressure toward high-potential assets and avoid over-investing already saturated codes. On the brand architecture side, they inform extension, co-branding or identity redesign decisions.
More broadly, prioritising distinctiveness over pure “likability” (i.e. investing first in memorability before likeability) is one of the most counter-intuitive and powerful messages from the Ehrenberg-Bass school. A memorable but little-loved brand often performs better than a loved but little-memorable brand.
Limits and perspectives
This approach is not without limits. It assumes relatively low-involvement purchase behaviour: in highly involved purchases (real estate, premium automobiles, critical B2B services), reasoned preference plays a more important role than simple mental availability. Moreover, distinctive assets must evolve to avoid banalisation, without breaking memory continuity: a subtle balance that requires method and discipline.
Recent developments integrate artificial intelligence to analyse massive visual patterns (images, videos, screenshots) and predict distinctiveness based on formal signatures. Even so, the empirical pillars remain stable: recall, cueing, recognition and distinctiveness continue to structure the reading, and uniqueness and richness scores offer an operational framework to operationalise them on a daily basis.
Want to measure the mental availability and strength of your brand’s distinctive assets?
If you already conduct brand trackings or image studies, you probably have the material needed to explore the mental availability dimension and audit the strength of your distinctive asset repertoire.
At Stat & More, we support our clients end to end:
- From design of measurement setups (association tests, cueing tests, brand-attribute matrices) to their operational deployment.
- From calculation of uniqueness and richness scores to provision of dashboards usable by marketing and creative teams.
- From LDA modelling of associative patterns to actionable recommendations on creative, media and brand architecture choices.
To discover how this approach can apply to your brand, we invite you to visit our website and contact us:
- Stat & More website: https://statandmore.com
- Stat & More presentation: https://statandmore.com/en/blog/sam-presentation/
- “Foundations of Brand Equity” article: https://statandmore.com/en/blog/sam-brandequity_01/
- “Brand Performance” article: https://statandmore.com/en/blog/sam-brand_performance/
Would you like to audit your brand’s mental availability, measure the distinctiveness of your assets or structure a tracking setup adapted to your challenges? Contact us today to discuss your challenges and together build an evaluation setup truly useful for your brand management.
To deepen our study and analysis methodologies, find our articles on the Stat & More blog.
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✔ Romaniuk, J. (2023). Better Brand Health: Measures and Metrics for a How Brands Grow World. Oxford University Press. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/better-brand-health-9780190340902?cc=fr&lang=en&
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✔ Umbrex. Distinctive Brand Assets Framework (Ehrenberg-Bass). https://umbrex.com/resources/frameworks/marketing-frameworks/distinctive-brand-assets-framework-ehrenberg-bass/
✔ Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science. https://marketingscience.info/