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If you learned brand management in the German-speaking world, you know identity-based brand management — the brand steering wheel, brand identity, the clean derivation of positioning from the inside out. For some years now a second term has surfaced in every other discussion: Mental Availability, coined by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. And with it the uncomfortable question: is everything I built my brand management on now obsolete?
The short answer: no. The longer one: the two approaches answer different questions — and that is precisely why good brand management needs both. This article explains where they rub against each other, where they complement each other, and how to bring them together in practice.
Inhaltsverzeichnis
Identity-based brand management (shaped in Germany above all by Burmann, Meffert and Esch) starts from a simple, strong idea: a brand has an identity — a self-image that forms inside the company — and an image that results from it in the minds of buyers. Identity is the sender side, image the receiver side. Manage the identity clearly and express it consistently, and you shape the image.
Tools such as the brand steering wheel structure that identity: what does the brand stand for (competence, origin)? What does it promise (benefit)? Which attributes, which tonality, which brand imagery? The result is a precise internal compass that strategy, communication and behaviour can align to.
The strength of this approach lies in meaning and in internal anchoring. It forces an organisation to become clear about what it stands for — and provides the basis for employees to actually live the brand (behavioural branding). That is no side issue: a brand strategy that is not carried from within remains a slide deck.
For a compact introduction to the fundamentals, Burmann, Halaszovich and Hemmann are a good starting point.
Mental Availability describes something different: the probability that a brand comes to mind at the moment of decision — across as many relevant buying situations as possible. Those situations are called Category Entry Points (CEPs): the occasions, needs and contexts through which a buyer „enters“ a category. The more CEPs a brand occupies, the more often it lands in the relevant set — and the more often it is bought.
The approach is receiver-side and memory-based. It does not ask „what do we want to stand for?“ but „how does memory actually work in the buyer?“ And the evidence from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute is sobering for anyone who relies too heavily on fine differentiation: buyers perceive far fewer differences between brands than brand managers believe. What makes brands grow instead is broad mental availability — carried by distinctive brand assets and by reaching all category buyers, not just a narrowly defined target group.
Anyone who wants to read the underlying debate about differentiation and distinctiveness in the original will find it at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute.
The identity-based school tends to treat a sharply differentiated identity as an end in itself — as if market success followed automatically once the identity is precise and unique enough. The Mental Availability perspective counters: even the finest identity is worthless if the brand is not recalled at the moment of purchase. Differentiation the buyer does not perceive is wasted budget.
Conversely, Mental Availability has a blind spot of its own. The approach tells you the brand must be memorable and broadly available — but hardly what you should fill those memory structures with. „Meaningless distinctiveness“ is a deliberate provocation, not a content strategy. What the brand should mean, and how the organisation delivers it, is answered far better by the identity school.
In short: one school is strong on content and weak on the reach of that content. The other is strong on retrievability and weak on the what. These are not opposites — they are two halves of the same task.
In our work we do not resolve the tension by pledging allegiance to one school, but by translating both into three manageable elements:
Meaning — what does the brand stand for in people’s lives? Which motive does it serve? This is where identity-based brand management, with its steering wheel and positioning, is at home. It supplies the content.
Brand codes — which assets make the brand recognisable at a glance and ensure the meaning is retrieved at all? This is where distinctive brand assets meet the part of Mental Availability that deals with recognition.
Experiences — what do people experience at every touchpoint, internally and externally? Here behavioural branding (the brand is lived from within) meets physical availability (the brand is easy to find and to buy).
The practical test for your brand management is therefore not „identity or Mental Availability?“ but:
Is our brand identity clear — and does it express itself in brand codes that are actually recognised?
Is that identity linked to enough buying situations (CEPs), or does the brand only come to mind in a single moment?
Is it lived internally, so that experiences confirm the identity rather than contradict it?
This interface is where it is decided whether a cleanly defined identity turns into brand growth. The brand steering wheel remains a valuable tool — but do not mistake a sharp identity for market presence. And Mental Availability remains a powerful growth principle — but broad availability without meaning is just expensive awareness.
Do you manage your brand on an identity-based model and wonder how much mental availability it actually has? Or do you have Mental Availability data and not know which content strategy follows from it? That is exactly the gap we close — talk to us.
