What is the effect of advertising on mental market share?

A great article by Vaughan, Corsi, Beal, & Sharp (2020) about measuring the effect of advertising on brand mental market share was recently published in the International Journal of Market Research. It contains interesting information for marketers, merchants, media agencies, students and other interested parties. The four new metrics discussed are very useful.

What is mental availability?

Brands exist only by virtue of the association networks (Lashley, 1950; Shacter, 1996) that we and they build in our brains (Keller, 1993). I wrote a blog post about that before on M! One association activates the other (Anderson, 1983; Zwaan et al., 2017) and the fewer associations you need to think about a brand, the more strongly the brand lives in your brain and the faster it will emerge in your brain. choice situations (Keller, 1993).

Association networks can consist of more than just facts about brands, such as their name, logo or color and the packaging in which it presents itself. It may also contain emotions, attitudes, behavioral components, user imagery and past events. And perhaps even smells, sounds and tactile information (Franzen & Moriarty, 2008).

Building on all this fine work, Byron Sharp and his acquaintances first used the term 'salience' for it and later (probably for branding reasons I presume) moved on to the term mental availability and its related mental market share. Mental availability of a brand is then defined by Vaughan et al., (2020) as follows:

…thepresenceand richness of memory traces that lead to the brand coming to mind in relevant choice situations, so it concerns the 'size' of the brand in your head .

This study adopts the view that advertising rarely convinces consumers and is persuasive in nature, but is merely a 'nudge' that, weakly, stimulates memory to make brands more salient by repeating, but also building new associations. . This increases the likelihood that the brand will come to mind the next time the consumer encounters a choice or consumption situation that is relevant to the advertised brand.

Read the full article in MarketingFacts.