A brand can score well on Mental Availability — many consumers think of it in buying situations — and still underperform in actual sales. The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute identifies this as a Physical Availability gap: the brand is mentally present but physically absent, invisible, or poorly formatted at the point of purchase.
Physical Availability is the ease with which a buyer can find and buy your brand in their specific buying situation — across all the channels they want to buy from, in the format they need, at the moment they need it.
Physical Availability is not a single measure — it is a diagnostic across three dimensions, each capable of independently blocking a sale even when the other two are strong.
The most fundamental pillar: if a consumer wants to buy your brand but it is not stocked in the stores or channels where they shop, the sale is lost regardless of how high your Mental Availability is. Presence is measured through retail audit data — weighted distribution, numeric distribution, and shelf facings relative to competitors.
A brand can be stocked and still be invisible. If a consumer walks past your brand to pick up a competitor's, you have lost a sale you technically had access to. Prominence measures whether buyers notice your brand at the point of purchase — in-store on the shelf, or in-app on screen. It is measured through consumer surveys asking which brands they noticed when they last shopped the category.
Being stocked and visible is still not enough if the format available does not match the buying occasion. A consumer looking for a small single-serve pack who finds only bulk sizes will buy a competitor. Portfolio measures whether the brand's pack sizes, formats, and price tiers cover the full range of Category Entry Points — leaving no buying occasion under-served.
Muhimma measures Physical Availability through a combination of consumer surveys, Google Reviews intelligence, and optional on-the-ground mystery shopping — giving brands a 360-degree view of how easy they are to find and buy.
Our BusyBee community of 400,000 identity-verified community members is deployed to measure Prominence and Portfolio directly — asking category buyers which brands they noticed on their last shopping trip, and which pack sizes and formats they found missing.
For brands with physical stores, restaurants, or digital platforms, Muhimma collects and analyzes Google Reviews at scale — categorising consumer feedback as Category Entry Points and Physical Availability attributes to build a real-time diagnostic dashboard.
For brands requiring on-the-ground validation, Muhimma deploys verified BusyBee shoppers to conduct standardised in-store or in-app visits — scoring Physical Availability against a defined framework and capturing photographic evidence.
Where in the market cannot your brand be bought at all? Identifies specific stores, regions, or channels with zero stocking — the most fundamental Physical Availability failure.
Are buyers noticing your brand at point of purchase, or walking past it to a competitor? Reveals whether packaging, shelf position, or facings are letting you down.
Which pack sizes or formats are blocking purchase in specific buying occasions? Pinpoints unmet format needs before they become a competitor's opportunity.
When your brand is absent or invisible, which competitor are buyers reaching for instead? Maps exactly who is capturing your lost sales at the shelf.
Which geographic areas have entire buyer pools that cannot access or notice your brand? Exposes gaps invisible from aggregate distribution data.
Does your portfolio span enough price tiers and use cases to recruit all buyer types? Tests whether your range architecture is leaving buyers — and sales — behind.
See exactly how we report Presence, Prominence, and Portfolio findings — including the Google Reviews intelligence dashboard and how diagnostic outputs are structured for marketing action. No signup required.
Your Mental Availability work is already building the right consumer associations. Physical Availability analysis ensures those associations convert into actual sales — by confirming your brand is present, prominent, and in the right format, everywhere your consumers want to buy.
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