One of the foundational pillars of brand theory is mental availability – being a brand that springs to mind when we think about buying something. And if you’re a brand that’s been a leader for decades, that really helps. It’s no coincidence that the brands most of us choose for everything from banking, to fast food to laundry are ones we grew up with.
But is this paradigm starting to fracture? Does history still matter in a world where digital-first brands such as Google and Amazon are brands that anyone under 35 did grow up with, and where more than half of us already turn to our favourite AI for recommendations when we’re thinking of buying something?
To explore this question, I’ve chosen to look at a category where, until very recently, the residents of the brand universe have historical roots that go beyond our childhood memories to those of our parents and even grandparents. Motor cars.
Between January and August 2026 Chinese brands accounted for 28% of UK car registrations. None of these brands were available in the UK before 2023. In a category where most of us only buy once every 3-5 years, how did so many new brands suddenly challenge historic leaders so quickly?
The model isn’t broken, the application is
Mental availability is not complicated. It’s the probability that someone in buying mode notices, recognises and thinks of a brand. That’s it. So, picture someone seriously shopping for an EV. They search and BYD comes up as an option, because it’s the world’s best-selling EV brand. They’ve probably seen it covered in the media. If they live in a major city, they’ve probably seen the car itself. On every count that matters, BYD has mental availability. Real, earned, measurable mental availability.
The mistake in the framing is assuming that e.g. Ford and Mercedes, being famous petrol and diesel brands, should be able to map that fame straight onto the EV category. They can’t, or at least not automatically. Specialist EV brands are likely to score just as well for mental availability among EV buyers as the century-old names do, because fame doesn’t travel between categories on its own. It has to be built there. The fact that BYD and Chery also happen to be cheaper is not the explanation. It’s the icing on the cake.
We’ve seen this singularity before
This is the same problem market leaders have always faced when a category splits in two under their feet. Think IBM when mainframes gave way to PCs. IBM wasn’t short of fame. It was short of relevance in the new category, because the new category required a different kind of expertise and a different kind of brand story, and being the biggest name in the old category bought them nothing in the new one.
EV has already become a distinct category from petrol and diesel. The brands making the best EVs are now judged against their direct competitors in that category, not against their own reputation in the one they used to dominate. Ford being underwater by more than 10% against the market isn’t a referendum on Ehrenberg-Bass. It’s what happens when a brand assumes its old fame is transferable currency and finds out at the till that it isn’t.
So, what do you actually do about it?
What you don’t do is discount, badge-engineer a cheaper model, and hope. What you should do is accept you’re facing the IBM dilemma: how do you build a brand in an area where you have less expertise than the new specialists and, worse, no credibility. One route is not to fight them on their own ground at their own price. It’s to look at how the value chain in mobility is shifting and work out where there’s room to move up it, rather than trying to out-manufacture the people who were built for exactly this.
That’s a much less comfortable strategy than “cut the price and wait for loyalty to kick back in.” But comfort isn’t the job. If you maintain a competitive price and genuinely better engineering, you keep taking share, because EV buyers aren’t judging you on who you used to be. They’re judging you on who’s in the list when they search.
Ford doesn’t have a mental availability problem in the category it built its name in. It has one in the category it hasn’t built a name in yet. Those are different diseases, and they need different medicine. Assuming the old fame still counts is how you end up outsold by a name half your customers couldn’t have pronounced five years ago.
Use AI to build influence
The Chinese wave has now broken on UK shores. They continue to grow market share, but many of the legacy brands have started to produce EVs that are getting good reviews. Plus, now we are past the early adopter stage, concerns such as range anxiety and lack of a national recharging infrastructure are pushing many drivers away from pure Battery Electrics to Hybrids. Enter the AI influencer.
I asked both Gemini and ChatGPT to recommend an EV under £50k. Both recommended Tesla, Kia and Renault. Gemini also recommended MG. ChatGPT recommended Skoda and Hyundai. Neither recommended a single Chinese brand (yes, MG is owned by SAIC but it’s still a legacy brand). I asked each of them why. The answers were very different.
Gemini said it was due to “specific real-world trade-offs cited by UK reviewers and owners”. It singled out steep depreciation, infotainment software not being as polished as other brands and delays in getting parts or finding service technicians.
ChatGPT on the other hand responded with a typical (in my experience) “oops my mistake” but also said “my earlier list placed too much emphasis on established brands”. In other words, ChatGPT’s first response was based on historic brand awareness.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.