Mental availability – how can your brand stand out from the crowd?
By Kelly Warth, Global Head of Data Strategy at Day One.
February 2026.
What happens when awareness looks strong, but uptake tells a different story
You’re six months into the launch of a new drug in a crowded category. Third to market, with established competitors already embedded in prescribing habits. Tracking data shows brand awareness at 95%. Message recall is strong, with physicians associating the brand with clear differentiation on efficacy and tolerability.
And yet uptake is slower than expected.
When you listen to physicians, the language is familiar. They talk about your brand being new and unfamiliar. About comfort with what they already use. About sticking with known options, even when they acknowledge those options are not best-in-class.
Your brand is known, but it isn’t being chosen.
Growth depends on being easy to think of shape prescribing
In crowded pharma markets, growth depends on more than awareness – yet most tracking still stops there. It depends on being easy to think of in the moments that shape prescribing. That is the role of mental availability.
Prescribing decisions are often made under time pressure, uncertainty, and cognitive load. In these conditions, physicians rely on mental shortcuts rather than deliberate comparison. Brands that come to mind quickly in specific prescribing situations are more likely to be considered and chosen.
Mental availability shows whether a brand is top of mind when it matters
Mental availability measures how easily a brand comes to mind in specific decision-making situations – including those that will drive future growth. By anchoring recall to real prescribing scenarios, it shows:
- The moments, needs or cues that trigger prescribing
- Who is prescribing, in what context, and why
- The brand cues and associations that act as shortcuts to recall
This shifts tracking from generic awareness to decision clarity. It shows where a brand is failing to surface, which associations need strengthening, and where investment will have the greatest impact on future uptake. Mental availability becomes truly diagnostic.
Why mental availability sits at the core of One Track
One Track is a next-generation brand tracking approach designed to help pharma teams understand what is changing in brand performance, why it is happening, and what to do next.
Mental availability is central because it:
- Acts as an early-warning signal of growth or risk, before those shifts show up in sales
- Shows whether positioning is strengthening or eroding versus competitors
- Links brand performance directly to future behaviour, not past exposure
Reframing the launch story changes the diagnosis
When tracking includes mental availability, the picture becomes clearer. Awareness and message recall remain high, but the brand is not coming to mind in key prescribing situations. For example, when initiating treatment in newly diagnosed patients with moderate disease, a competitor remains the default, driven by familiarity and perceived safety.
The data now explains what sales alone could not. Where the brand is failing to show up. And why uptake is stalling.
The bottom line
The difference between knowing a brand and choosing it is mental availability.
And that difference is what drives growth.
For brands where awareness looks strong but growth is stalling, mental availability offers a clearer signal of what needs to change to drive future uptake.