How to make your brand top of mind

Being remembered is not the same as being remembered at the right moment

Top of mind awareness is the measure of which brand someone names first when they think of a category. It is usually tested by asking people to name brands in a category unprompted, and counting who comes first.

Most advice on the subject tells you to be memorable. Post consistently, use a strong logo, tell your story. I think that is the wrong unit of work, and it is why so much small business branding produces recognition without enquiries.

The useful question is not whether people remember you. It is whether you come to mind at the moment someone realises they have the problem you solve. Those are different achievements, and only the second one produces work.

Mental availability, and why it beats being different

The research most worth knowing here comes from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. Byron Sharp set out mental availability in 'How Brands Grow' in 2010, and Jenni Romaniuk and Sharp developed the practical framework in 'How Brands Grow Part 2' in 2015.

Mental availability is the propensity of a brand to be thought of in a buying situation. The building blocks are category entry points, which the Institute describes as the moments when someone mentally enters a product or service category. Linking your brand to more of those cues increases the chance you are recalled when one occurs.

The part that contradicts most marketing advice is the emphasis. In this framework, being thought of matters more than being meaningfully different from your competitors. Buyers are not comparing your positioning against a rival's. They are retrieving whatever comes to mind and choosing from that short list.

One caveat comes from the Institute itself. More entry points do not automatically produce more growth. Which moments you attach yourself to matters, and choosing them badly wastes the effort. Treat the framework as a way to direct work rather than a promise attached to volume.

Your category entry points, in the buyer's words

This is the exercise I would run before touching a logo or a content calendar. It replaces 'what should we post' with 'what moment are we trying to be present for'.

For each moment, you need the words in the buyer's head rather than your own vocabulary. The gap between those 2 vocabularies is where most small business marketing disappears.

The moment	What they think or say	Where you need to be present	What identifies you
Their current supplier misses a deadline	'I cannot keep doing this'	Search results for the problem, not for your job title	The phrase you use for the failure they just experienced
They are asked in a meeting whether anyone knows someone	'Who do I know who does this'	The memory of a person, not a company	Your name attached to one specific speciality
A regulation or platform change lands	'Does this affect us'	The place they read about the change	Being early with a plain explanation of what it means
They inherit a mess from a predecessor	'Where do I even start'	A page that describes the mess rather than the service	Naming the situation accurately enough that they feel seen
Their own growth breaks a process	'What we do now does not scale'	Peer conversations and referral networks	A clear description of the stage of business you serve

Fill in your own version with 5 rows. Then check what you published last month against it. In my experience most of it will not map to any row, which is the diagnosis.

The same table, filled in for a real business

PCLA are independent loss assessors working in Northern Ireland and Scotland, and I work with them. Loss assessing is a useful test of the argument in this article, because nobody thinks about loss assessors until something has already gone wrong with an insurance claim.

The mistake would be to treat 'I have had a flood' as the entry point. That is the event, not the moment somebody reaches for a phone. People do not call at the point of damage. They call later, when the claim itself has become the problem.

The first row below is the most common and the easiest to miss, because it does not look like a buying moment. Most people do not know what a loss assessor is or that the role exists. What sends them looking is a conversation with their insurer that leaves them confused, so the content that reaches them at that moment cannot start by naming a service they have never heard of.

The moment	What they think or say	Where you need to be present	What identifies you
A call with the insurer produces jargon and confusion	'I do not understand what they are asking me for'	Plain explanations of the claims process, before any mention of your service	Explaining the process without requiring them to know the job title of the person who does it
The offer is nowhere near the cost of the work	'They have offered £3,000 and the roof is going to cost far more than that'	Search results about disputing a low offer	Published examples showing what an offer became after it was challenged
The insurer has rejected the claim outright	'They have said no and I do not know if that is the end of it'	Anywhere explaining why claims get declined	Being clear that a rejection can be reopened with evidence
The damage has come back after the repair	'It was supposed to be fixed and the mould is back'	Content about reopened and ongoing claims	Naming the situation rather than describing a service
Nobody can find the leak	'The water is coming from somewhere and no one can tell me where'	Leak detection searches, which are a separate need	Holding the investigation and the claim together
The loss is too big to manage alone	'I am living in rented accommodation and this is beyond me'	Referrals, and the memory of someone who has handled a large claim	Experience with claims at that scale

Those rows are drawn from claims the business has handled. The published case studies include a Perthshire roof where a £3,000 offer became £15,000, a Belfast escape of water where £6,000 became £73,000 with accommodation paid, a claim in Omagh that the insurer had rejected and which settled at £17,000, and a Falkirk case where mould returned after the first repair and the settlement roughly doubled after further investigation.

Here is the limit, and it is the one this whole article runs into. I can tell you the situation people were in when they made contact, because they described it. I cannot tell you what put PCLA in front of them at that moment. Google reviews, search, a referral and simply knowing the name already all lead to the same phone call, and unless a caller says 'I remembered that case' or names the person who recommended them, the route is unknown.

That gap is normal and it is worth being honest about. Knowing the moment is still useful without knowing the route, because the moment is the thing you can write for.

Distinctiveness, not differentiation

The second half of mental availability is being recognisable once you are recalled. Romaniuk's 'Building Distinctive Brand Assets' in 2018 sets out the test, and it uses 2 measures.

Fame is the share of category buyers who link an asset to your brand. Uniqueness is how exclusively that asset points at you rather than a competitor. Plotting assets on those 2 axes shows which are worth investing in: high on both is a genuine asset, high fame with low uniqueness means people know the thing but it is not yours, and low fame with high uniqueness is something worth building.

For a business without a tracking study, the cheap proxy is a covering test. Take your last 5 social posts, remove your name and logo, and ask whether someone in your market could identify you from what is left. If the answer is no, you do not have distinctive assets, you have a house style. Most small businesses fail this on wording rather than visuals, because the visuals are the part they paid attention to.

Distinctiveness is not the same as differentiation. Differentiation is a claim about being better or different. Distinctiveness is being identifiable. You can be identifiable while selling much the same thing as your competitors, which describes most professional services.

The claim about colour, and why it is not here

Earlier versions of this article said brand colours increase recognition by up to 80%. I have removed it.

The figure circulates widely and is usually attributed to a university study that nobody links to. I could not find a primary source that says it, and I am not prepared to repeat a number I cannot trace. Colour does work as a distinctive asset when it is owned consistently over a long period. That claim stands on its own without a fabricated multiplier attached, which is the same discipline I applied to the invented statistics in the role of emotions in purchase decisions.

If you will never be top of mind in your category

Here is the part the framework does not say out loud, and where I think most small business advice becomes dishonest.

A 3-person consultancy will never be the first brand named when someone thinks 'marketing agency'. The category is too large and the competition too well funded. Chasing top of mind awareness at that level is a way to spend years producing content that changes nothing.

What is achievable is being first in a much narrower entry point. Not 'marketing', but the specific situation you handle better than anyone your buyer knows. The narrower the moment, the smaller the number of competitors in the recall set, and the more likely a single well-aimed article or a single conversation is enough to put you in it.

That reframes the work. You are not building awareness across a market. You are trying to own 3 or 4 moments completely.

I should be clear that this is my judgement about how the research applies at small scale, not a finding from it. The Ehrenberg-Bass work is built on large brands in large categories. The mechanism, that recall happens through cues attached to buying situations, should hold at any size. The strategy of deliberately narrowing is my inference from watching where small businesses get their enquiries, and I have no data that isolates it.

Measuring it without a research budget

Top of mind awareness is normally measured with unprompted recall surveys, which are out of reach for most small businesses. Three cheaper substitutes tell you most of what you need.

• Ask every new enquiry what prompted them to get in touch now. Not how they found you, which gets you a channel. What happened that made them look today. The answers are your real category entry points.
• Track referral language. When someone recommends you, what do they say you do. If 5 referrers use 5 different descriptions, your positioning is not being retained.
• Count unprompted mentions in your own network over a quarter. Being named in conversations you were not part of is the only version of this that matters at small scale.

None of that is precise. It is directional, cheap and more use than a brand awareness figure you cannot act on.

Start with the enquiry question. Ask the next 10 people what happened that made them look, and write the answers down verbatim. That list is the beginning of the table above, and it is more accurate than anything you would have guessed.