Most marketing spends its life on one question: why pick us and not them? It’s an expensive question, because every competitor in the category is answering it in nearly the same words, usually with a bigger budget than yours. There’s a cheaper question that gets far less attention. When should anybody think of us at all? Some companies answer it by simply inventing the moment, and my favourite example is in Japan. Valentine’s Day arrived in Japan in the 1950s, slightly mangled. The custom settled that women give the chocolate and men receive it, which left the sweet industry with a lovely problem: half the country was buying, and the other half was sitting there with a lap full of free chocolate. In 1977 a confectioner in Fukuoka called Ishimuramanseido started selling marshmallows to men so they could give something back on 14 March, a month to the day after Valentine’s. It called the date Marshmallow Day. The national confectionery association liked it so much that it adopted the idea, opened it up to every kind of sweet and renamed it White Day, and it’s been in the Japanese calendar ever since. Nobody had to make better chocolate. They spotted a gap in the year and built a day to fill it. Japan has form here. In 1970 Takeshi Okawara, who ran the first KFC in the country, started selling a bucket of fried chicken as a Christmas dinner. Hardly anyone in Japan had a turkey, or an oven big enough to roast one, and there was no settled idea of what you were meant to eat on 25 December, so he offered one. In 1974 KFC took it national as “Kentucky for Christmas”. Half a century later, Christmas Eve is KFC’s biggest day of the year there, and families order their bucket weeks ahead. We’re not immune in Britain either. We don’t have Thanksgiving, so we had no earthly reason to have a Black Friday. Amazon brought the sale over in 2010 anyway, and within four years it had eaten the back half of the retail calendar. We imported the sale and left the turkey behind. The marketing scientist Byron Sharp calls what they were all building mental availability. “A brand’s mental availability refers to the probability that a buyer will notice, recognize and/or think of a brand in buying situations.” Byron Sharp, marketing scientist, writing on his blog, 26 March 2011 If your brand is linked to one moment, you get considered once. Link it to six and you get six chances, without having to be better than anybody at anything. I suspect that’s why so many fourth-quarter plans look identical: a discount, a new header image and a brief asking to “drive consideration”, when the real problem is that nobody has a reason to buy this month rather than next. If people only think of you in December, more December advertising won’t fix it. The one key takeaway Stop asking why people should choose you; instead, ask when they should think of you. How to use this at work Ask what was happening, not who they are. Take your last twenty orders or enquiries and write down the situation that set each one off: moving house, a new hire, quarter end, a Friday night. Segments tell you who your customers are. Situations tell you when, and that’s the bit you can actually advertise to. Add one line to every brief. Next to the audience, write the moment. If nobody in the room can name it, the brief isn’t finished, and it’s much cheaper to find that out before the media’s booked than after. Borrow a moment rather than building one. New dates are hard work. Existing ones are free and already in people’s diaries: the start of term, the January rota, the first week in a new job. Pick one nobody in your category has claimed and turn up there every year. Give it a year before you judge it. White Day only caught on because a whole industry kept saying it. You’re asking people to form a habit, so keep the name the same long enough for them to form it. The marvellous thing is that occasions cost almost nothing. Somewhere in your customers’ week there’s already a moment your product fits that nobody has claimed, like the first Monday back after a holiday, or the handover before someone goes on leave. You don’t need a new product or a bigger budget to own it. Give it a name and keep using it until other people start using it too. Want to go deeper Brand Building covers how brands actually grow, including the unglamorous business of being thought of at the right moment.