Beyond the Black Box
For too long marketers and insights managers have struggled with black box metrics and dashboards filled with lots of data, but little insight and even less impact.
One reason is that brand health is defined in different ways by different companies. These numbers—including well-known metrics like consideration or brand love—appear on marketing dashboards around the world but aren’t linked to business growth and crucially fail to convince the finance department or other stakeholders.
Many companies would benefit by making space for a new metric that isn’t a black box, one that has a publicly available methodology and a scientifically proven link to business results: Mental Availability.
The thought of exploring and tracking a new metric may cause many in the market research community to worry. Not just because you’ve invested years in tracking existing metrics (and changing them would mean giving up that data). But also because changing a tracker is uncomfortable and risky: How do I explain a new metric to my stakeholders? Will my ad agency know how to build a campaign focused on a new goal? Will my organization adopt these new metrics, or will nobody look at that part of the dashboard anyway?
Mental Availability, however, is worth taking the risk. It’s a new, transparent, standardized brand health metric that explains how easily a brand comes to mind when consumers are in a buying situation and helps identify the most promising growth strategy for brands of different sizes, across all industries.
It’s based on the proven methodology from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science (EBI) and has a strong correlation with sales (r = .75 – .95 according to EBI Professor Jenni Romaniuk in her book “Better Brand Health” (2003)).
Quantilope’s own meta-analysis, based on more than 100 brands, confirms a strong correlation and proves that a survey-based Mental Availability metric can explain 69% of variance in real-world sales. And best of all, the standardized methodology allows marketers to rigorously compare performance across markets and brands using Norms.
Mental Availability Growing in Awareness
These attributes are helping Mental Availability attract a growing audience. Since we started offering automated Mental Availability trackers in 2023, there’s been a ten-fold growth in new set-ups between 2023 and 2024, followed by another doubling of that number in the subsequent two years. If you’re now considering tracking Mental Availability for your brand, you’re in good company.
But for many brands, there still can be a reluctance to adding a new metric to your brand health tracker. Here are some tactics you can do to make the process easier:
- CEP Workshop: Start by bringing all stakeholders into the same room to learn about Mental Availability and Category Entry Points. Education and co-creation are essential parts of the process and come to life in what we call a “CEP Workshop.” Ours follow Jenni Romaniuk’s 7W Framework to uncover the most important motivation, reasons, needs, and purchase drivers for your category—called Category Entry Points.
- CEP Prioritization: After generating Category Entry Points—the building blocks for tracking Mental Availability—run a pre-study to prioritize them according to real consumer feedback. This ensures that you’re tracking the most relevant motivations, needs, and occasions to provide a truly representative view of your category in consumers’ minds.
- Mental Availability Tracking: You can simply add a Mental Availability question to your existing tracker. In essence, you only need to add a single question in order to unlock a plethora of new metrics and insights.
- Validation Against Business Outcomes: One of the most important steps you should do is to validate your brand health metrics, like Mental Availability, against actual business outcomes (such as sales, users, subscribers). This is rarely done for more traditional brand health trackers but has immense power when it comes to getting buy-in from senior leaders (including your CFO). Proving that your brand health metrics actually correlate with meaningful business outcomes will likely turn skeptics into fans of a new metric.
- Education & Activation: Tracking and validating Mental Availability for your brand is only the first step. Use educational resources to help all internal and external stakeholders understand these new metrics, run workshops to activate the insights, and leverage Norms to set realistic goals and growth targets.
Connecting to Business Growth
Shifting to a metric that directly correlates with business growth isn’t just an upgrade for your dashboard—it’s the key to turning your marketing team into proven drivers of revenue and true business consultants.
By taking these practical steps, you can demystify brand health metrics and finally give your brand the clear, evidence-based roadmap to growth it deserves.
