Easy to think of and easy to buy: the two pillars of brand growth

Byron Sharp and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute (Australia) have spent decades analyzing actual purchase data across dozens of industries. Their conclusion contradicts much of what marketing still teaches: brands do not grow by creating absolutely loyal customers. They grow by continuously attracting new buyers and ensuring they remain easy to think of and easy to buy. These two aspects are known as mental availability and physical availability.

Easy to think of (mental availability): when the need arises

Mental availability is not brand awareness in the conventional sense. Brand awareness simply asks: "Do you know this brand?" Mental availability asks a harder question: "When you need to buy that thing, does this brand come to mind?"

Sharp refers to the situations that trigger purchases as Category Entry Points. These are specific occasions, specific feelings, specific contexts in which customers think of a product or service. The brand that is anchored to many such entry points in the memories of many people has a high capacity for mental availability.

This explains why repeatedly advertising the same image, the same colors, and the same messaging is not a lack of creativity but rather discipline. Each touchpoint reinforces the neural pathways connecting the brand to the purchasing situation. Sacrificing consistency for "novelty" breaks that connection.

For B2B brands or specialized services like brand design, the entry points into the industry are not "I need a logo." They are much more specific moments: "we are about to launch a new product," "customers often confuse us with competitors," "we want to upgrade our target market." The brand that comes to mind at those exact moments wins the competition from the very first round.

Easy to buy (physical availability): at the right time, in the right place

Physical availability is the other half of the equation. A brand that is thought of but not easily purchased will lose customers right at the conversion point. Sharp defines this as making the brand "visible, memorable, and easy to buy" wherever customers might look.

For consumer goods, purchase accessibility is about presence on supermarket shelves, on delivery apps, in search result listings. For specialized services, it means: a responsive website, a barrier-free contact process, an easily accessible portfolio, and a straightforward consultation booking process. A small obstacle at the purchase step is enough for customers to switch to the next option on the list, even if you were already in their minds.

Brands grow by reaching more buyers, more of the time, in more buying situations.

Byron Sharp, How Brands Grow (Oxford University Press, 2010)

Both legs must be steady

A common mistake is misallocated investment. Many businesses pour budgets into advertising to build mental availability, but the purchasing process is complicated or the distribution channels are thin. Customers think of you but cannot buy. Conversely, some businesses optimize their sales channels very well but do not invest in identity, resulting in customers not thinking of them first and only finding them when comparing prices.

Sharp points out that both mechanisms operate in parallel. Lacking one, the other cannot fully compensate.

The role of design in being easy to think of

This is the brand design space with the clearest strategic function, not an aesthetic one. The distinctive brand assets, as termed by Romaniuk, are the technical means to accumulate presence in the mind over time.

Consistent colors, consistent typography, consistent layout: each time customers encounter these signals in a new context, their brains reinforce the connection between the brand and that situation. This is a memory mechanism, not aesthetics. Romaniuk measures two dimensions of brand assets: Fame (the level of widespread recognition) and Uniqueness (the level of being uniquely associated with that brand, not confused with others). Brand assets accumulate both dimensions to enhance their presence in the mind effectively.

This also explains why "refreshing the identity" is often a more costly decision than people think. Each change erases a part of the pathways accumulated in the customer's memory, requiring a rebuild. It is not impossible, but one must understand the opportunity cost before deciding.

Entry points in the category: practice map

To apply this mindset framework in practice, businesses need to answer two specific questions. First, in what situations do customers typically think of your industry? This is a list of entry points that need to be identified, not guessed. Second, in each of those situations, does your brand come to mind, and can it be purchased?

The gap between the actual answer and the ideal answer is where to prioritize: invest more in identity to build presence in the mind, or remove barriers in the purchasing process to improve physical availability, or both.

Growth does not come from absolute loyalty

Sharp synthesizes an observation that has been tested across many industries: most customers of any brand are infrequent buyers, purchasing many different brands within the same sector. Absolutely loyal customers account for only a small fraction. Large brands do not have significantly higher loyalty rates; they simply have more buyers, including those who buy very infrequently.

Practical conclusion: a strategy focused entirely on retaining existing customers while neglecting to reach new buyers tends to slow growth. Building broad mental availability, maintaining barrier-free purchase accessibility, and ensuring consistency in identity are three actions that operate in parallel, not sequentially.

This is not an argument to overlook product quality or customer experience. That is a mandatory foundation. However, good quality that is not thought of, or thought of but not easily purchased, will still hinder growth on one of those two legs.