Are you building mindshare or just awareness?

When your ideal customer has a challenge and thinks of you first… that’s mindshare.

THINK ON IT: Are you building mindshare or just awareness?

We all want brand awareness for our business. In fact, we can spend a lot of money to get potential customers to gain awareness of our company or product. 

But there’s something even better than brand awareness, and that’s mindshare. Mindshare is preferential brand recall.

Think of it this way. If you ask the average person who provides mobile cell service in their area, they’re likely able to rattle off a few brands pretty quickly: AT&T, T-mobile, U.S. Cellular, Verizon. That’s brand awareness. They’ve seen all the commercials.

But if they have an immediate answer when you ask them who they trust to deliver them the best service, that company has won their mindshare. That company successfully created an association between what the customer desires and their firm. 

We all have these associations in our minds about people and organizations. Who do you immediately think of when the dashboard light on your car turns on? Or when selecting between grocery stores to shop at? Or when you have a tax question?

Mindshare is gained because you’ve built a reputation for delivering on the association, either directly to the customer or indirectly by word of mouth or other credibility indicators. Whenever a specific need arises, you become top-of-mind as the favored solution.

Building brand awareness is important, and, in fact, perhaps more favorable than mindshare efforts when the events that might trigger a consideration are either unknown or unpredictable. 

But when you know the likely trigger events (the dashboard lights) for your product or service, then having a strategy to build a mindshare connection to those events is helpful. Without one, you have to spend more to create awareness across a broad possible set of needs and across a broad set of possible triggers. Once you’ve developed a solid event–solution mindshare, when that trigger arises, you don’t have to advertise to them at that moment. They already think of you. 

If you can identify the events or triggers that your product or service is suited to address, then you can create more mindshare for your offering.

Paid subscribers, read on for mindshare architecture to help build one for your business. (Become a paid subscriber.)

“It’s always about mindshare, not marketshare.” — Ron Johnson, former JCP CEO, Apple EVP Retail

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