Have I got this RIGHT?

I get it, mental availability is the chance of a brand coming to mind in a buying situation.

On that particular occasion or when that particular need arises, people think of your brand.

Call it salience if you like or even top-of-mind awareness.

So this is about brand consideration. Being part of someone’s consideration set.

And that can result in getting chosen. Your brand might well be the only one in the set.

Or there may be others.

That’s where emotional connection comes in. I would define that as the bond between what your brand stands for and what your potential customers want, emotionally.

This is mainly about brand preference. Meaning. Differentiation. Competitive advantage.

That advantage doesn’t have to be emotional. Unique features and functional benefits do exist. But they are hard to find and even harder to defend.

But what it means is that they are more likely to buy your brand than others. It’s another probability.

And then being preferred doesn’t guarantee getting chosen. The finishing line still has to be crossed.

That could come down to price, a promotion, the value equation.

Or the buying experience, the ease of it, the enjoyment, the whatever shopping need people have.

None of this happens necessarily in sequence. That’s the old linear AIDA model.

It’s also all interlinked. Mental availability is a competitive advantage.

And emotional connection is part of mental availability. We remember what we want to remember and that includes brands that promise to deliver a specific emotional benefit.

There’s also the role played by the product experience. Some people may like that so much they search out your brand next time. Others just put a mental tick against its name. Either way, it’s the chance of retention.

That’s the other thing - and I’m grateful to a number of people on LinkedIn for reminding me of this recently. It’s the not-insignificant matter of trust.

Partly that’s back to the product experience. If you’ve delivered once, you can deliver again.

But it’s also about consideration, preference and choice. Trust comes from having a reason to believe, credibility. It’s part of evaluation.

Not everyone buys a brand because they recognise a logo and link it to a situation. If your data tells you that, you might not have the full picture.

But distinctiveness really matters. When your brand turns up in people’s lives, they need to know it’s you. Recognition. Otherwise, all bets are off. The probability is zero.

So that’s where I am right now.

I still believe brands have to make an emotional connection and that’s because brand choices are driven by their deeper needs.

They aren’t the only drivers and they don’t only come into play in one part of the funnel. You can’t somehow switch them off.

We are only human.

I now look forward to being corrected.