Being loved is not enough. Being remembered is what sells.

Most brand builders agree that the goal is to be liked by customers. But liked in what sense? Liked when asked in a survey, or liked enough to be thought of immediately when a purchase is needed? These are two very different things, and the confusion between them is why many brands invest in the right areas but achieve the wrong results.

How purchase decisions actually happen in reality

In consumer behavior research, there is an important finding that many brand builders have yet to fully grasp. Most purchasing decisions are not made through careful consideration. We do not sit down to list the pros and cons of each brand before buying morning coffee, choosing a printer, or booking a hotel. We pick the first thing that comes to mind or the one that looks most familiar on the shelf.

Daniel Kahneman calls this the fast thinking system: reflexive, automatic, and effortless. This system operates most of the time. The slow thinking system, which involves deliberate consideration, is only activated when the risk is significant enough and the buyer has the time and motivation to analyze. For most ordinary goods and services, the fast system wins.

This leads to an important consequence: the brand that comes to mind for buyers at the right moment during their purchasing situation has a real advantage. This is the concept that Byron Sharp and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute refer to as mental availability, or more closely, salience (being present in the mind when needed).

A brand grows by increasing the number of people who think of it at the moment of purchase, not the number of people who choose it in a survey.

Brands grow by increasing the number of people who think of them in buying situations. Not the number of people who prefer them in surveys.

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

What can preference measure, and what cannot?

Preference, or the level of liking, is often measured under ideal conditions: the respondent is relaxed, focused, and prompted with the brand name before answering. This is not the actual purchasing condition. The real purchasing condition means that the buyer is busy, standing at the checkout, or scrolling through their phone with dozens of options appearing at once.

In that situation, preference does not automatically turn into action. A brand that buyers "prefer" but that does not come to mind at the right moment will lose to a less-loved but more familiar one. Research by Jenni Romaniuk at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute shows that buyers usually consider only a small set of brands in a single decision, typically two to four. If a brand does not make it into that set, preference no longer matters.

Category Entry Points: anchoring the brand at the right moment

Salience is not just general fame. A brand can be well-known yet not thought of at the right moment because it is not anchored to a specific purchasing situation. The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute uses the concept of Category Entry Points to refer to the contexts, occasions, and specific needs that buyers typically think of when considering a category.

For example: "need a design urgently before a launch event" is one category entry point for businesses looking for a design studio. "Want to upgrade our identity after scaling up" is another. A brand that is closely linked to many common entry points has broader mental availability and comes to customers' minds in more situations.

Building salience thus has a specific meaning. It involves creating consistent, repeated identity signals over time that are closely tied to the exact contexts your target customers encounter when they need your category. The goal is for the right people to remember you at the right time, not just for everyone to know you exist.

Why do many brands misdirect their investments?

Preference is easier to measure than salience. A survey asking "Which brand do you like most?" produces a number immediately, is easy to put in a report, and easy to make everyone happy with. Salience is harder to measure, requires more complex research methods, and gives less intuitive results. This is why many organizations invest in being liked, building emotional stories and optimizing goodwill. They pay less attention to whether the brand actually comes to the customer's mind at the right moment.

The biggest trap is when a brand invests in becoming "meaningful" or "different" in an abstract sense. Meanwhile, it neglects to build consistent, memorable identity signals, repeated for long enough to settle into long-term memory. A beautiful emotional campaign can create instant goodwill but not a memory structure, meaning a structure of memory that ties the brand to specific buying situations.

Distinctive brand assets work because they recall memory structures built over time. Consistency is not an aesthetic choice. It is the mechanism of memory.

Distinctive brand assets work because they trigger memory structures built over time. Consistency is not an aesthetic choice. It is a memory mechanism.

Jenni Romaniuk, Building Distinctive Brand Assets, Oxford University Press, 2018

Preference and salience are not opposites

This does not mean that preference is unimportant. A brand with both high salience and preference will have a double advantage: it will be thought of first and chosen when compared. However, the order of priority must be clear: salience is the condition for preference to have a chance to flourish. If a brand does not make it into the buyer's consideration set, preference will never be activated.

Kantar BrandZ reports that brands rated "meaningful and different", meaning meaningful and distinct to buyers, can command prices 38% higher than their competitors. But this figure only matters once the brand has appeared in the decision process. Meaningful but invisible does not generate revenue.

Real-world implications for brand strategy

If salience matters more than preference in most buying decisions, then the strategic question cannot stop at "Do customers love us?" The question needs to go further: "When do we appear in their minds, in which situations, and through which signals?"

This calls for a different view of brand consistency. Consistency is not about keeping colors aligned for aesthetic reasons. Consistency is a mechanism for accumulating memory: each time a buyer encounters the same set of the brand's identity signals, that memory is reinforced by another layer. With enough layers, the brand becomes a reflex, no longer a choice to be weighed.

And conversely, every time a brand appears inconsistently or with the wrong signals, it is not just a missed opportunity. It is small noise in the memory structure being built. When enough noise accumulates, that structure collapses, and the brand has to start over from the beginning.