Beyond the Funnel: Rethinking Brand Health

For years, brand health tracking has relied on a familiar set of measures.

Awareness.

Consideration.

Preference.

Usage.

Loyalty.

Those metrics grew out of the traditional marketing funnel, and they still have value. They help organizations understand whether a brand is known, whether it is evaluated, and whether it ultimately gets chosen.

But the funnel has always described only part of the story.

What it measures is what happens after a brand enters the buyer’s field of view.

What it struggles to explain is how a brand gets there in the first place.

That gap is where the concept of mental availability becomes useful.

What Mental Availability Measures

Mental availability refers to the likelihood that a brand comes to mind when a buying situation arises.

The idea gained prominence through the work of Byron Sharp and research from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute.

The distinction is straightforward.

Awareness asks whether someone recognizes your brand.

Mental availability asks whether your brand comes to mind when a relevant problem appears.

A brand can have respectable awareness scores and still fail to appear when a decision moment arrives.

And if a brand never enters the initial consideration set, the downstream funnel metrics lose much of their practical meaning.

Why This Matters in B2B

In many B2B categories, buyers spend most of their time out of market.

A company might evaluate a new platform, vendor, or service once every few years. Most of the time, potential buyers are not actively researching alternatives.

Then something happens.

A system fails. A new requirement appears. A strategic initiative gets approved.

At that point, buyers rarely begin from a blank page. They start with a short list of brands that already feel relevant.

Those brands form the initial frame for the entire evaluation process.

Mental availability strongly influences which brands make that early list.

Once the shortlist exists, the traditional funnel metrics start to matter again. Evaluation begins. Preferences form. Procurement enters the process.

But the first gate has already been passed.

The Funnel Still Matters

Mental availability does not invalidate the funnel.

Awareness, consideration, and preference still tell us something useful. They help explain how effectively a brand converts interest into action once it enters the evaluation process.

Mental availability addresses a different question.

Not how well the brand performs once considered.

But how often the brand gets considered in the first place.

Seen this way, the funnel and mental availability are not competing models. They describe different phases of the same reality.

Mental availability influences entry into the buying conversation.

The funnel describes what happens after entry occurs.

What This Means for Brand Health Tracking

Once mental availability enters the picture, brand health measurement begins to shift.

Instead of focusing primarily on abstract perceptions or general awareness, measurement moves closer to the situations where buying decisions actually begin.

The questions change:

• Which brands come to mind when a specific problem appears?

• Which companies are associated with particular use cases or triggers?

• Which competitors consistently appear together in the same mental set?

These questions reveal the memory structures surrounding a brand within a category.

And those structures often tell us more about future growth than static attitude scores alone.

Where Catalytic Customers Can Help

One practical way to explore mental availability is by talking to the customers who spend the most time thinking about the category itself.

Not experts in the formal sense. Experienced participants who pay attention to how products actually perform and where the category could work better.

These customers tend to have a sharper mental map of the landscape. They notice which brands show up when particular problems arise, and which ones rarely enter the conversation.

Their perspective often reveals the underlying mental associations that broader surveys struggle to surface.

For companies trying to understand their position in a market, that perspective can be surprisingly clarifying.

At CoinJar Insights, we’re building new ways to track and strengthen brand relevance using this lens, with Catalytic Customers at the center of that work. Because being remembered when it matters is the most valuable brand outcome of all.