SmilingCFO has launched an online diagnostic tool to help marketing leaders assess whether their brand comes to mind when customers are ready to buy.
The Mental Availability Review is a short online assessment designed for marketers under pressure to show what is driving growth. It takes less than five minutes to complete and gives users a personalised report highlighting potential strengths, gaps, and opportunities across three areas: Mapping, Activation, and Measurement.
The Mental Availability Review is aimed at marketing teams in larger consumer brands that want to pressure-test brand position before investing in wider strategy or research. Users receive an immediate indication of areas that may need closer attention, followed by a downloadable PDF report by email.
The tool is based on the principle that buyers rarely consider every brand they know. Research from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute has helped popularise the idea that brands compete to be one of a relatively small number that comes to mind in buying situations, making mental availability a major factor in brand growth.
Mental availability is built by linking a brand to the situations in which buying decisions happen. These moments, known as Category Entry Points, help explain why some brands are retrieved from memory while others are overlooked. If a brand is not mentally linked to those buying situations, it is less likely to be considered, even where general awareness is high.
Martin at SmilingCFO said: “Most brands are still judged heavily on awareness, but awareness alone doesn’t mean someone will choose you.”
He added: “The real question is whether people think of your brand in the situations that influence purchase. It’s also whether you come to mind ahead of competitors. That’s what Mental Availability is really about.”
SmilingCFO said the diagnostic helps marketing teams review how prepared they are to apply mental availability principles. Its three areas are intended to show whether a brand has mapped relevant buying situations, activated against them, and measured the strength of those mental connections.
Martin said: “The Mental Availability Review is designed as a starting point. It helps marketing teams reflect on how prepared they are to implement Mental Availability principles and whether this deserves closer attention. A fuller Mental Availability Assessment can then explore this in more depth.”
Brand teams are facing sharper scrutiny over the commercial contribution of marketing, particularly as budgets come under pressure and senior teams demand clearer evidence of growth drivers. Awareness remains a familiar brand metric, but the mental availability framework shifts attention towards whether a brand is easy to recall in specific buying situations.
That distinction is especially relevant for consumer brands with complex portfolios, multiple purchase occasions, or fragmented media environments. Recognition alone does not determine whether a brand is considered at the point of choice; memory links built around real buying contexts are more closely tied to whether a brand enters the customer’s shortlist.
By turning those questions into a diagnostic exercise, SmilingCFO is offering marketing teams a way to identify where brand strategy, activation, and measurement may need to be strengthened before larger research or planning work begins.
