I was talking to a founder last week about the importance of this idea of "mental availability" and how it relates to branding building, social and content.

There’s a great book called How Brands Grow by Byron Sharp. I highly (highly) recommend giving it a read if you’re building a brand because it provides a counter-narrative to a lot of what we like to believe about marketing.

The one that stuck with me: loyalty is basically a myth. Even your “best” customers are buying competitors. Coca-Cola drinkers still grab a Pepsi now and again. The takeaway is that brands don’t grow by squeezing more loyalty out of people, they grow by getting more people to buy them at all.

Sharp explains they do this in two ways:

1. Physical availability → you’re easy to buy.
2. Mental availability → you’re easy to remember.

Physical availability is straightforward. If you’re not on Amazon, in Target, or at Sephora, people quite literally can’t buy you. The more physical distribution you have, the better (leaving aside any caveats of supply chain and financing).

Mental availability is the harder part. Historically, building mental availability has come from ads, whether TV, billboards or print.

Today, much of it comes from social, and this goes beyond just posting on your own channel. It's a system that comprises:

• Organic content
• Paid content
• TikTok Shop
• Influencer seeding
• Collabs and partnerships

The brands that are winning quickly (think Poppi, Liquid Death, Graza, even B2B products like Ramp) are building mental availability through this system of distribution on social media, and ultimately that's half of how they grow.

-Ashwinn

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