Mental availability.
A question every director and owner-manager has asked out loud at some point. "Why is our competitor growing faster than we are? Our product is better."
In almost every case we encounter, the first part of the question holds. The competitor is indeed growing faster. The second part often holds too. The product is genuinely better, or at least no worse.
But the assumption connecting the two doesn’t hold. A better product doesn’t automatically lead to greater market share. Market share doesn’t depend on what your product is. It depends on who’s thinking of you at the moment they’re buying.
In the marketing literature, this principle is called mental availability. Put plainly: how often and how easily customers think of your brand at the moment they’re making a purchase decision. This isn’t a feeling, not an unmeasurable phenomenon. It’s a directly measurable concept with thirty years of empirical research behind it.
And it’s an uncomfortable observation, because it means most companies trying to improve their product in order to sell more are turning the wrong dial.
Where the research comes from
Byron Sharp has published thirty years of research on this from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute in Australia. It’s one of the most cited research traditions in marketing. Andrew Ehrenberg, on whose work the institute is built, did groundbreaking work on buyer behaviour back in the 1960s. His successors (Sharp, Romaniuk, Dawes, and others) have empirically refined that work across thousands of datasets in dozens of categories.
The core conclusion is consistent. Market share correlates directly with mental availability: the degree to which a brand is present in the minds of potential buyers at the moment the decision is being made. Not with product quality. Not with how satisfied existing customers are. Not with technical superiority.
Sharp uses the term “mental availability” as the standard label. The principle has also been called brand salience in some of the broader literature. Both refer to the same underlying concept.
What this means in practice
Take a director in industrial wholesale who discovers that his customers, on average, think of four suppliers before they start a new search. Two are market leaders with broad recognition. Two are specialists who sit in their head at specific buying moments. His business is one of the four. Good.
Take another director in the same market who discovers that his customers think of five suppliers, and he isn’t one of them. He only enters the picture when the customer searches further, or when his sales team actively approaches them.
Both directors have a product of comparable quality. Both have satisfied existing customers. But the first structurally gets inbound enquiries because he sits in the consideration set. The second has to make himself visible for every deal, costing time and budget, and keeping conversion lower.
This difference is almost never the result of product differences. It’s the result of memory work. Whoever is consistently present at the right buying moments, with distinctive cues that customers attach to them without thinking, gets remembered. Whoever isn’t, doesn’t.
In consumer it works the same way
A direct-to-consumer coffee brand notices its revenue is stagnating. The product is talked about glowingly by customers. Reviews are good. People who try it often buy again. But revenue isn’t growing.
The analysis shows that consumers in the category think of three or four brands before they consider a new purchase. The well-reviewed brand isn’t in that list. People who hear about it buy. But relatively few new people hear about it.
To restore growth, the product doesn’t need to be better. It needs to be more often in people’s heads when they think about coffee. That requires consistent visibility at the moments people are thinking about coffee, and cues (colour, shape, name, sound) by which the brand can be attached to the category without thinking.
Why this is so under-recognised
A few reasons this observation doesn’t get the attention it deserves.
It goes against intuition. Directors are usually the product people in their organisation. They believe in product, craft, quality. The idea that market share isn’t determined by product feels unpleasant.
It’s harder to manage. Product quality sits within your control. Presence is built through consistent activity over one to three years, and is measured in softer numbers (top of mind, prompted recall, share of search). For most boards, this is less tangible than a product roadmap.
It doesn’t belong to one department. Marketing is responsible for visibility, but the choice of what you bring to market with what story belongs at the board. The marketing department can execute within a given framework, but the framework itself is a board decision. And that decision often doesn’t get explicitly made.
It’s hard to measure in the short term. An ad has directly measurable conversion. Building mental availability only shows up in numbers over twelve to eighteen months. Most budgets don’t look that far ahead.
What this should mean for your marketing budget
Les Binet and Peter Field, two British researchers who collect effectiveness data for the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, derive a rule of thumb from this. Roughly 60 percent of your marketing budget should go to brand-building (long term, presence, recognition). Roughly 40 percent to direct activation (campaigns, leads, conversions now).
Most companies we encounter run at 10/90 or worse. Almost everything goes to what’s measurable now. Almost nothing goes to what makes the difference in two years.
This isn’t a case for less performance marketing. It’s a warning that performance marketing runs on the presence you built before. Anyone spending 90 percent of their budget on performance is living off the presence their predecessors built. There’s an end to that.
The diagnosis
Improving a product to sell more often works, but less often than directors think. Market share depends largely on your mental availability: how many people think of you when they’re buying. Not on whether you’re better.
This is uncomfortable, because it changes where you should be spending time, money, and attention. It shifts from internal quality (which companies enjoy spending time on) to external presence in buyers’ minds (which companies struggle with).
The question isn’t whether your product is good. The question is whether you’re in the consideration set at the moment that matters.
A director who takes this question seriously discovers that marketing investments start to look different. More toward consistent presence, less toward campaigns-with-a-promo. More toward recognisable cues (what Sharp calls “distinctive brand assets”), less toward constantly new creative concepts. More toward long-term brand building, less toward conversion tactics.
The discomfort of that shift is precisely why most companies don’t make it. And precisely why the companies that do grow disproportionately faster after two to three years.
Further reading
Want to read more about how presence connects to the other two strategic layers underneath lost deals? Our pillar piece works it out: Why are we losing this? The three strategic layers underneath every lost deal.