Mental and Physical Availability in Marketing

Mental and physical availability are crucial marketing concepts.
Mental Availability:
- Definition: The likelihood of a brand coming to mind at the point of purchase.
- Focuses on what happens in people's minds.
Physical Availability:
- Definition: Making the brand easy to find and buy.
- Focuses on making it possible for people to buy the brand.
- Concerns what happens in the external world.

Snickers ad example illustrates mental availability.
Slogan: "You get a little hostile when you're hungry."
Demonstrates clever strategy for building mental availability by associating Snickers with hunger.

Snickers Super Bowl ad had high creative execution and media planning (seen by many people).
Aims to enhance mental availability.
Issue: The brand wasn't sufficiently present in key buying locations.
Problem: Snickers was not available in many places where people were likely to buy.
Problem: Insufficient stock where it was available.

Mental Availability:
- Goal: Reach at least once per person in the population.
- Reason: Memory effects linger after exposure.
- Diminishing returns from repeated exposure in short time frames (e.g., seeing the same ad multiple times in one ad break).
Physical Availability:
- Reach is based on the occasion.
- Seeing Snickers in multiple shops is beneficial because the product needs to be present for purchase.
- Exposure and purchase happen simultaneously.
- Limited lingering effects of physical exposure, mainly awareness of store availability.
- Significant cost for not being present at the point of purchase.

Lack of mental availability is detrimental, but recent exposure mitigates the impact.
Three pillars of physical availability:
- Presence: Being in the right stores and available for relevant occasions.
- Relevance: Offering products people want to buy in appropriate pack sizes.
- Prominence: Being easy to find on the shelf; avoiding distractions and ensuring visibility.