What brand salience really means (and why it matters)

You’re in an unfamiliar city, desperate for a morning coffee. What brand pops into your head first? Probably Starbucks.

That moment when a brand instantly surfaces at the point of need is what marketers call brand salience. It’s not just about awareness (knowing a brand exists). It’s about recall in the exact situations where a purchase decision happens.

High brand salience means your brand is first in line when customers are ready to buy. And that’s why it’s one of the most powerful, yet underused, levers in brand strategy.

In this article, we’ll unpack what brand salience is, why it matters, how to increase it, and how to measure it.

What brand salience really means

Brand salience can be defined as the likelihood that consumers will think about your brand when making a purchase. For instance, when you want to buy a to-go coffee, are you thinking of Starbucks, Dunkin' Donuts or something else? Whatever brand comes to mind first enjoys the highest brand salience specific to you.

Brand awareness means people recognize your brand. Brand salience means they recall it when they’re about to buy.

Take Apple: almost everyone knows the brand (awareness). But if you’re shopping for a $200 smartphone, Apple won’t enter the picture. In that context, Android brands are far more salient because they’re top of mind at the moment of purchase.

So what actually drives a brand to become top of mind? For that, we need to look at the psychology behind salience.

Why some brands stick in memory

The psychology behind salience helps explain why some brands stick in memory more than others. There's plenty of research to draw on.

In Conceptualizing and measuring brand salience, Jenni Romaniuk and Byron Sharp write that "brand salience reflects the quantity and quality of the network of memory structures buyers hold about the brands."

Think of memory structures simply as the links your brain makes between a product and an experience. It isn't as complicated as it might sound. In this context, a memory structure refers to the connection between an outside item (like an iPhone or a cup of Starbucks coffee) and an internal memory.

Brands often use this concept to make campaigns "sticky." Through frequent exposure to brand assets, including color combinations, logos and trademarked phrases, a consumer's memory structures become stronger.

When you see the phrase "just do it," you think of Nike. When you hear "think different," you think of Apple. You've been exposed to these messages and their related campaign assets so often that there's a strong connection between the brands and your memory. At this point, you'd have a hard time not associating those phrases with the brands.

Today, marketers have so many ways to reach people and influence their purchasing decisions.

Marketers build salience through repeated exposure across channels, from TV and social to PPC and content marketing. What matters isn’t the channel, but the consistency of memory cues.

Linking salience to buying situations

You may employ all of the tactics listed above and wonder how those are any different than brand awareness tactics. 

And you're right. Recognizing the psychological framework is only half of the challenge. You must also connect memories with key events that encourage consumers to think about your brand while preparing to buy something.

That involves cataloging and prioritizing category entry points to enhance mental availability at crucial times among your target audience.

It'd be great if everyone had a uniform list of entry points to focus on. But like so many things connected to a good brand strategy, it's specific to your company. You need to conduct research to identify the entry points that work specifically for your brand, its products and the people likely to purchase.

Let's say you're managing a campaign for an ice cream company. Your key entry points include:

• Grocery store ice cream aisles
• Pop-up locations during summer events
• Branded store locations that only sell products from the ice cream company
• Specialty stores with freezer sections
• Ice cream trucks

You can enhance mental availability by identifying your top entry points (based on cost, ease of implementing and anticipated return) and attaching your brand to them. This ensures that your brand comes to mind when the customer is making key purchase decisions.

How to build brand salience that sells

High brand salience makes your brand more likely to be chosen at the moment of purchase. In fact, Bain Consulting finds that up to 90% of B2B purchases come from the brands buyers already had in mind on day one of their research.

So how do you build that kind of mental availability? By helping people create strong memory structures linked to your brand.

More memory links = higher salience

The more a brand is linked to various memory structures in the brain, the more salient it becomes, making it more likely to be recalled during purchase decisions. For instance, a person who wants to start using email marketing campaigns to boost their company's reach is frequently exposed to Mailchimp through its long-term marketing efforts, ads, and industry mentions.

These efforts increase Mailchimp's brand salience and make it an obvious consideration for potential users. The person has so many memory structures connected to Mailchimp that they can't help but think about the brand when they need an email marketing service.

Stronger memory links = lasting salience

The relevance and personal significance of a brand can create high-quality memory structures, enhancing brand salience. For example, someone who has been using an iPhone and MacBook for many years will have strong, high-quality memory structures related to Apple, making the brand highly salient and memorable.

So, how do you go about improving brand salience? Three steps can help:

1. Clear positioning

Some marketing efforts try to position a product or service as the solution for several types of situations. While that can work as a top-of-funnel strategy that builds recognition, brand salience requires a single, clear message. For example, lime sorbet = hot day refreshment, dark chocolate = nighttime indulgence.

2. Distinctive brand assets

Distinctive brand assets help a company and its products stand out from competitors. They can also contribute to building brand salience by encouraging consumers to consider the brand when buying a product.

Some of the most distinctive brand assets include:

• The Apple logo, which evolved over the years while remaining iconic
• Mercedes-Benz's three-pointed emblem
• The Nike "swoosh" (and the "Just do it" phrase referenced above)
• The FedEx logo, which includes a subtle arrow to indicate movement

In B2B, Salesforce’s cloud logo or HubSpot’s sprocket carry the same instant recognition. When you see them, you immediately know what brand they represent. They don't necessarily encourage brand loyalty, but they certainly improve overall brand visibility and recognition.

3. Category entry points

Jenn Romaniuk of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute defines category entry points as "the cues that category buyers use to access their memories when faced with a buying situation." In other words, a CEP can include any situational or environmental context that triggers a memory in the buyer.

How to measure brand salience

Since brand salience exists in the world, we can measure it to make sure our marketing attempts reach their goals.

An illustration from The Smart Branding Book shows how you can measure mental market share, which is closely aligned with mental availability and brand salience.

Dan White breaks the process into five stages:

1. Talk to a diverse set of consumers to learn why they choose certain products in a category and how they make the decision.
2. Use the interviews to identify potential CEPs.
3. Start quantifying your research by surveying consumers and asking them which CEPs they use most often. (In case it isn't obvious, you want to use plain, straightforward language when talking to consumers. Most of them will have no idea what you want if you ask them about "category entry points.")
4. Ask consumers which brands come to mind for each CEP.
5. Visualize the results to see which brands dominate each category entry point. If your brand isn’t showing up, it’s a sign you need stronger memory structures to win recall in those buying moments

The bottom line on brand salience

Brand awareness makes you recognizable. Brand salience makes you unforgettable and more importantly, buyable. The brands that win aren’t just the ones people know. They’re the ones people remember first when it counts.

By sharpening positioning, building distinctive assets, and linking your brand to the right category entry points, you create the mental shortcuts that turn recognition into revenue.

Because in the end, it doesn’t matter how many people know your brand. What matters is whether they think of you in the moment that matters most.

FAQ

What is the difference between brand awareness and brand salience?

Brand awareness and brand salience have a lot in common, but there's one important difference: brand salience refers to how often consumers think about your brand when actively buying products or services. Brand awareness is a more general metric that applies to how familiar consumers are with your brand.

What are important books about brand building?

Byron Sharp's How Brands Grow is probably the most important book about building brands. It's a great book everyone in marketing should read. Keep in mind, though, that it can be a bit dogmatic. Learn from it, but remember that you might need to take a more nuanced approach in real-world scenarios. You can't overestimate the power of creativity.

Marketers should also read a mix of perspectives to adapt frameworks to real-world needs. Some of the books that will make you a well-rounded marketer include:

• The Long and Short of It by Les Binet and Peter Field
• How Not to Plan: 66 Ways to Screw It Up by Les Binet and Sarah Carter
• Building a StoryBrand by Donald Miller
• Building Distinctive Brand Assets by Jenni Romaniuk
• Better Brand Health by Jenni Romaniuk
• Eat Your Greens: Fact-Based Thinking to Improve Your Brand’s Health by Wiemer Snijders
• Lemon by Orlando Wood
• Look Out by Orlando Wood 

Also, If you want a short read that packs in a lot of useful information, check out The Smart Branding Book: How to Build a Profitable and Resilient Brand by Dan White.