The bias towards AVAILABILITY

You have to hand it to Ehrenberg-Bass.

They’ve now managed to get a large proportion of the marketing community talking about mental and physical availability.

Pretty impressive to have rebranded both salience and distribution.

But it’s worth remembering we are talking about a heuristic here. A behavioural economics magic trick.

Availability is one of nearly two hundred cognitive biases. That beautiful chart by John Manoogian III puts it in the ‘too much information’ sector, where we notice things already primed in our memory or repeated often.

It sits alongside the illusory truth effect, the mood-congruent memory bias, the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, the base rate fallacy and the empathy gap. And yes, I’ve checked, all five of those are in the same camp.

But availability's the one that’s won through with brands.

I wonder why.

It’s easy to see the appeal of physical availability because it’s about making your brand easy to buy. A vending machine in a train station on a hot summer’s day.

And mental availability? That’s also about ease, the likelihood of a brand coming easily to mind in buying situations - the when, where, with whom, with what and why of decision-making.

So the theory is you need to build up and continually refresh a network of associations in people’s minds linked to your brand.

And you also need a number of distinctive brand assets to trigger these associations. Oh look, a red sign, I fancy a Coke on the way home.

Like all biases availability is a mental short-cut. It works on the basis that if something can be recalled, it must be important - or at least more important than alternative solutions that aren’t as readily recalled.

It’s also a sleight of hand. You can observe the trick happening but you don’t always know how it’s done, except that creativity was somehow involved.

One consequence of this is convincing yourself the only thing that matters is being distinctive, standing out, the easy-to-measure bit.

But I think most of us have now re-realised that differentiation matters to brands too.

And creating meaningful differentiation is hard.

You need to look at your target and their surface and deeper needs. The surface needs are key at a category level but brand choices are, at least in part - and I would say large part - driven by deeper needs.

Then you need to consider your product’s features, its functional and emotional benefits, personality, origins, values, purpose. Everything.

You have to put all this in a competitive context. Where does everyone else sit? Where could you sit? Where should you?

You even need to understand the world you’re in. More people are now arguing that culture makes brands. I’m not sure about that. Not long ago those same people were arguing brands made culture.

Then you decide what you stand for. You make a choice. And even if your tactics are then dynamic and fluid, you stay true to your essence. Otherwise you’ll be like a ship in a storm.

Of course, the killer argument for availability will always be how busy we are and how little we think about brands. Both true.

But saying it’s all about being easy to mind and easy to find, sorry, that’s too easy.