How accessible is your brand in practice?
15 January 2025
The many forms of accessibility and why they matter
By Jon Wilkins
In this new six-part series we will be exploring the key success factors that are likely to shape the fortunes of your brand. This series draws on the latest behavioural science and proven brand metrics, as well as our experience of effectively measuring thousands of brands across four decades. Together, these key factors represent the ingredients needed to help shape and grow brands successfully.
In our first article we looked at the importance of your brand’s Salience. This feature will explore why the Accessibility of your brand is so fundamentally important. No matter how mentally available a brand is to consumers, if they cannot find the right product or service easily, when they need to buy or use it, then your chances of a sale may have disappeared.
Accessibility, or lack of it, can undermine commercial performance, even for otherwise strong brands
Imagine the situation. Megan and her family have decided it’s movie night on Friday and they’re going to have Pizza! She already knows everyone’s preferences, but when she’s doing the weekly shop, some of their desired toppings aren’t available in their go-to brand. What does she do? Choose a different topping the kids might not like? She hasn’t got time (or the will) to go to another supermarket. She either buys an alternative brand, or she gives up on Pizza altogether. She might not end up with their preferred brand, but it may be one of a number of acceptable alternatives in her consideration set. This ‘satisficing’ behaviour may even encourage Megan to try a completely new brand that’s on offer. A missed purchase and a gain for one of your competitors.
Imagine another scenario. Jake wants to buy a new Nike running top. He searches online for Nike running tops. The website he clicks on first has a vast choice of brands, types and styles, but the filters don’t allow him to narrow the search on the criteria that matter to him, and there isn’t enough information about the product to be sure what he is buying. Eventually he gives up and buys from a site that does make it easy to search and find the right product, and he’ll probably never use the first site again. The first retailer had great findability, but its paid-for search investment proved fruitless, and worse, may have put Jake off them permanently.
Accessibility can take many forms
There are many forms of accessibility. Which of them are most relevant to your brand depends largely on the sectors and channels that your brand competes in. Ultimately, the challenge is to make your brand as easy as possible for potential consumers to find and buy by reducing behavioural barriers to purchase as much as possible. As our two examples illustrate, physical availability in-store may be key when Megan is choosing a pizza, but, findability and website functionality are more likely to matter to Jake when he’s buying products online.
Availability matters
“Decades of research into the patterns in buying behaviour and market-metrics has led to the surprising conclusion that brands compete for custom primarily in terms of mental and physical availability. Brands that are easier to buy, for more people in more occasions, get bought more often” Byron Sharp, Ehrenberg-Bass Institute.
Sharp rightly argues that, because consumers are polygamously loyal (they are seldom 100% loyal), availability (or lack of it) can over-ride any marginal preference for your brand in the repertoire of brands they consider acceptable choices. Your other marketing investments could be wasted if buyers cannot find your brand, even when they want to.
Accessibility is more than availability
As we have seen, there are many forms of accessibility and physical availability is just one of them. When thinking about your brand consider our six main forms of accessibility below. Do them well and you can unlock the full potential that your brand has to offer. Do them badly and you may be inhibiting your brand’s ability to compete, however attractive a proposition it represents to potential buyers.
- Are you physically available in-store or online? Very few brands are genuinely 100% available, all of the time. You may have listings with a retail chain, but are you in every store? Are you missing other retailers, occasions or even entire channels, where consumers could be buying your brand?
- Are you easy to find on-shelf or via online search? With the typical supermarket stocking around 30,000 products, you need to be located somewhere logical to the buyer and easy for them to spot, whether they are actively searching for it or making an impulse purchase.
- Are you available in the variant they need? It is no good stocking one flavour of ice cream, or a pet supplement for one size of dog if that’s not the one they want.
- Can they easily find the information they need to make a decision on-pack, on-shelf or via the online description? They may choose a rival brand if it is simply easier to determine whether it’s the right type or size for their needs.
- Are you available in an affordable size or format? If your buyer has a large family to feed, small packs may represent poor value for money, but larger packs may be unrealistic if they are a lighter user.
- Are you easy to buy? Particularly for direct online buying, but also other forms of ordering such as hospitality or services. If you make the process too difficult or complicated your buyer may not return again.
When and how do we measure it?
Accessibility is effectively the gateway to your brand. Any research attempting to understand the strengths and weaknesses of your brand should be taking the relevant aspects of accessibility into account, whether you are doing Brand Tracking, a brand audit or any other form of survey that aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of how your brand is performing. Research into the customer journey that asks the right questions can also shed light on your brand’s accessibility and the specific pain points that may be hindering the path to purchase.
Too often availability and accessibility are dismissed as obvious, or something ‘we can’t do anything about’. But to ignore it is to create a distorted understanding of your brand’s situation and the challenges you face.
The bottom line
Accumulated evidence suggests that accessibility is at least as likely to define the success of your brand as any other factor. No matter how attractive, compelling, different or irresistible your brand is, or what great value for money it represents, if your consumer can’t find it or it is hard for them to buy in the form they need, all of your other marketing efforts could have been wasted.
Every brand needs an honest appraisal of its accessibility, and that starts with making it one of the key elements of your brand’s strategy and one that is measured and regularly reviewed.
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