| TL;DR: Most brands focus heavily on what happens once a buyer is ready to evaluate options. But Byron Sharp’s conversation with Tim Soulo makes a strong case for everything that happens before that moment. From Coca-Cola’s continued advertising to DocuSign’s long buying cycle, this article looks at why consistent visibility, recognizability, and mental availability play such a large role in how brands actually grow. |
I’ve listened to a lot of marketing podcasts over the years, so it takes something specific for an episode to really stick with me. This conversation between Byron Sharp and Tim Soulo did.
Sharp is the Director of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and the author of How Brands Grow, a book built on empirical research rather than gut feel or whatever happens to be popular in marketing at the time.
In a June 2026 episode of the Ahrefs Podcast, he sat down with Tim Soulo and covered almost everything marketers tend to debate: funnels, differentiation, brand purpose, advertising spend, and even why Coca-Cola still runs ads when almost everyone already knows the brand.
The central idea running through the conversation is this: most marketing is optimized for the moment someone is ready to buy. But by the time a buyer is evaluating vendors, the shortlist is often already half-formed in their head.
According to him, it was built over months or years of quiet exposure to names they kept seeing, content they trusted, and brands that showed up consistently in places they paid attention to. If you were not part of that slow accumulation, getting onto the shortlist later becomes much harder.
Sharp calls this mental availability. Marketers like me call it building brand recall value. However, our idea is the same: your brand should come to mind in the specific moment when someone is looking for a product in your category.
The episode is nearly an hour long. But four moments in particular made this idea much easier to understand.
The Soviet TV Factory
Sharp tells this story early in the conversation, and it is probably the one that stayed with me the longest.
In the Soviet Union, there were no brands in the way we think about them today. The state made everything. Factories produced televisions, stamped them out, and shipped them. There were no names or identities that helped a buyer distinguish one manufacturer from another.
The problem was that some factories made good televisions and some made terrible ones. Consumers had no signal to work from, so they created one. They started reading the serial numbers on the back of the television. A specific sequence of digits told them which factory had made it, and eventually which ones had a better reputation for lasting.
Nobody designed this as branding. The serial numbers became brands because people will always find a way to carry quality signals forward.
Now think about how many B2B software categories have a similar problem today. Products can look nearly identical to a buyer who has not used them, while the real differences only become visible after the contract is signed.
In those situations, buyers fall back on whatever signals they can find. Say a G2 badge, an analyst mention, or a name a trusted colleague recommends. Those signals start doing the work the serial numbers did.
The idea is that brands that show up consistently in the right places become easier to recognize and remember before anyone is actively looking for them. That is where mental availability starts to matter.
Why Coca-Cola Cannot Stop Advertising
The Coca-Cola example Bryon mentioned makes the distinction between awareness and mental availability even clearer.
Coca-Cola is one of the most recognized brands in the world. Almost everyone knows it exists, and yet the company continues to spend heavily on advertising every year.
In fact, Coca-Cola spent approximately $5.146 billion on advertising in 2024, according to its annual filing. That was roughly the same amount it spent in 2023 ($5.01 billion), despite already being one of the most recognizable brands worldwide.
You might wonder why? Sharp’s answer is interesting.
According to him, the single largest group of Coca-Cola buyers purchases it approximately once a year. Not weekly or monthly. Roughly once a year.
So while almost everyone knows Coke, most people are not thinking about Coke at any given moment. They might be having lunch, standing in front of a drinks fridge, or ordering something at a coffee shop. Coke could be relevant in any of those situations and still not come to mind.
For Coke, even with all that history and recognition, maintaining those associations still requires work. That is why they continue advertising: not to announce that Coca-Cola exists, but to keep rebuilding the connection between the brand and the situations where someone might actually reach for one.
Sharp has a great line on this:
“Advertising is better at keeping the plane in the air than it is at getting it up there in the first place.”
For content and brand teams, the implication is pretty clear. One big campaign, one viral piece, or one quarter of heavy spend can help, but it does not replace consistency.
Mental availability or brand recall builds over time. People need to keep encountering the brand, recognize that it is the same brand, and slowly build familiarity with it. Then, when the buying moment eventually arrives, there is already something there to remember.
The Eight-Year-Old Differentiation Test
There was one point in the podcast that I really liked was when he touched the differentiation aspect.
You see, most brands believe they have some differentiation. However, very few can make that difference immediately obvious to the buyer.
His test to find out is wonderfully simple – Show your positioning to an eight-year-old and ask whether it is different.
Take Ferrari and a Toyota Corolla. A child can understand the difference almost immediately. One looks dramatically different and promises a very different experience. You do not need a messaging framework to explain why the two are not interchangeable.
That is obvious differentiation. Now take the positioning used across much of B2B SaaS: “The AI-powered platform built for teams that want to move faster and scale with confidence.”
You could put that sentence on several SaaS homepages across any category, and it would probably fit.
An eight-year-old would struggle to see the difference. More importantly, a busy buyer probably would too. Sharp’s point is fairly precise: if you need a long explanation to show why you are different, the difference may not be strong enough to meaningfully change how people buy.
To avert this, there is another thing brands can build: distinctive assets.
Your visual identity, your color, your voice, and the recognizable elements that consistently appear whenever someone encounters your company. These do not necessarily make the product different, but they make the brand easier to recognize.
The scale of investment behind those recognizable assets can be considerable. Toyota reportedly committed around $835 million to its Olympic sponsorship across four Games, ending with Paris 2024. That was not simply money spent explaining individual car features. It helped keep Toyota’s name and visual identity visible around moments watched worldwide.
That matters because recognition helps mental availability compound.
If someone sees your content several times but never registers that all those interactions came from the same company, very little has accumulated. Distinctive assets help connect those encounters. Over time, the brand becomes easier to recognize and easier to remember.
The Decade Before the Decision
Sharp introduces the 95/5 rule too. According to him, at any given moment, roughly 95% of your potential buyers are not in the market. They are not evaluating options, comparing solutions, or preparing to make a decision. They may be eventually, but not now.
To illustrate this, he asks you to think about any category where the case for switching is obvious to everyone and yet most companies still haven’t made the move. Electronic contract signing is one example.
Ask almost any business whether it makes sense, and the answer seems clear. Of course it does. Yet many companies take years to actually change. Not because they forgot or changed their minds, but because the old process still worked well enough and there was always something more urgent competing for attention.
During those years, the job of any brand in that category is not necessarily to convert every company immediately. It was to become the name already in the buyer’s head when something finally forced the decision.
And you cannot build that position after someone enters the market. Research published by 6sense in 2025 reinforces this. In its study of nearly 4,000 B2B buyers, 95% chose a vendor that was already on their shortlist on Day One. The vendor preferred before any sales conversation began went on to win 77% of deals.
That shortlist did not appear overnight. It was shaped by the companies, ideas, and content buyers had encountered long before the buying process officially began.
This is where the argument becomes especially relevant for content marketing. A buyer might read something your company publishes today and not need your product for another two years. But when they do, they may remember the name that kept appearing in places they trusted.
That accumulated presence is what mental availability looks like in practice. You were there before they needed you.
If your content speaks only to people who are ready to buy right now, you are speaking to a very small part of the market. The rest still matters. They simply matter later.
The One Question Worth Taking Into Your Next Planning Meeting
Sharp’s broader framework is simple enough to fit into a sentence.
Two things determine how a brand grows:
- Mental availability – the chance that your name comes to mind in a buying situation,
- Physical availability – how easy it is to actually buy from you.
But the question I would take from this episode into any budget or strategy conversation is even simpler: When someone in your category is finally ready to buy, do they think of you?
If not, you have work to do. You see, a lot of work happens long before anyone is ready to convert, which also makes its effect harder to see while it is happening. But that does not mean nothing is being built. In the era of AI visibility, the kind of work you do shapes the third-party signals that build the next shortlist. When that happens, you ought to be on the list.
To do that, the time to act is now.
