Available

One of the promises of selling direct to consumer is the amount of data we collect on our customers.

In a conversation on this topic with a brand founder this week, we talked about whether owning this data was as useful and valuable as it was billed initially.

This founder’s take?

He’d rather own his customer’s bathroom than own his customer’s data.

(The brand, you might guess, sells personal care products.)

There’s a connection between this founder’s comment and Byron Sharp’s stated importance of mental and physical availability. As longtime readers know, we’re a fan of Sharp’s research and views on brand growth.

Though it may sound similar, mental availability—by Sharp’s definition—is not the same as brand awareness. (Sharp defines mental availability as the probability that a consumer will “notice, recognize and/or think of a brand in buying situations.”) Sharp has also defined those buying situations—at least at the point of acquisition—as “category entry points.”

There are five of them, and—to bring this back to the conversation with the founder above—they are not available in the data traditionally associated with the advantages of DTC.

In fact, they are data points available to any brand, provided they prioritize talking to their customer:

• Why are you buying from the category?

• When are you buying from the category?

• Where are you buying from the category?

• With whom are you buying from the category?

• With what are you buying from the category?

According to Sharp, the more of these entry points a brand can cover, the greater the likelihood of a brand’s mental availability.

Which makes you wonder: if the data available to us via DTC channels isn’t the data that primarily makes a brand more available to consumers, are we focused on collecting—and using—the right data?