The uncomfortable truth about professional services across Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom is that excellence has become table stakes. Every law firm claims expertise. Every medical practice promises quality care. Every financial advisor offers trusted guidance. Yet some practices thrive while others—equally capable, equally qualified—remain perpetually invisible to potential clients. The difference isn’t capability. According to Professor Jenni Romaniuk’s groundbreaking research, it’s mental availability: whether your practice exists in buyers’ minds before they need you.
This isn’t about being different. It’s about being impossible to forget.
The Professional Services Paradox: When Being “The Best” Means Being Invisible
Most Australian practices operate under a dangerous delusion. They believe that professional competence alone creates market position. That being “different” or “better” automatically translates to being chosen. But as Romaniuk’s research demonstrates, “People think you need to be wildly different to be chosen. But that’s not how real people buy.”
Real people—your potential clients—don’t conduct exhaustive comparative analyses of every law firm, medical practice, or financial practice in their area. They choose from what’s mentally available to them at the moment they need help. If your practice isn’t occupying mental real estate in their minds before they need you, you’ve already lost.
Consider how clients actually seek professional services in Australia. A business owner faces an unexpected dispute with a supplier. A family needs urgent medical attention for an elderly parent. An individual receives an inheritance and needs financial guidance. In these moments, they don’t open spreadsheets comparing every possible provider. They recall—instantly, almost unconsciously—the practices that have built mental availability through consistent, distinctive brand assets.
The harsh reality? Most practices have spent years building expertise while completely ignoring the cognitive architecture that determines who gets remembered and who gets forgotten. They’ve perfected their service delivery while remaining functionally invisible to anyone who hasn’t already used them.
From direct observation of practices across Australia, the pattern is clear: they organically start, usually very small, focus intensely on growth, and if they have the fundamentals plugged in, they become established. But they never consider their own brand and its positioning. This organic growth trap becomes their biggest liability in an increasingly competitive market.
Distinctive Assets: Why Your Logo Isn’t Your Brand (But Your Reception Greeting Might Be)
Here’s where Romaniuk’s research becomes particularly devastating for traditional professional services thinking. Distinctive brand assets aren’t just visual elements—they’re the complete sensory package that makes your practice instantly recognisable and recallable. Yet most practices have reduced “brand” to a logo designed years ago and business cards they reluctantly update when they run out.
Your distinctive assets extend far beyond conventional marketing materials. They include:
The Sensory Signature of Your Practice
- The specific way your receptionist answers the phone
- The layout and feel of your waiting area
- The structure of your client communications
- The format of your invoices and documents
- Even the way your team dresses and presents
These elements matter because they create memory structures. When every element reinforces the same identity, recognition becomes automatic. When these elements constantly change—as they do in most practices—the brain has to work harder to identify you.
But here’s what most practices get catastrophically wrong: they change these elements constantly, believing they’re “refreshing” their image. Every change erodes the mental structures clients use to remember and recognise you. As Romaniuk advocates, “be consistent, be visible and look like yourself.”
Category Entry Points: The Moments Your Practice Needs to Own
Traditional marketing thinking suggests you should target a narrow niche. Romaniuk’s Category Entry Points (CEPs) research reveals why this approach leaves money on the table for professional services. CEPs are the situations, needs, or triggers that cause someone to think about engaging a professional service. The more CEPs your practice is associated with, the more opportunities you have to be chosen.
For legal practices, CEPs might include:
- “Just bought a house” (conveyancing)
- “Starting a business” (commercial law)
- “Going through separation” (family law)
- “Had a car accident” (personal injury)
- “Inheritance received” (estate planning)
Most firms make the mistake of trying to own just one CEP—becoming “the divorce lawyers” or “the commercial property specialists.” But Romaniuk’s research shows that growth comes from linking your brand to multiple CEPs, not from narrow specialisation in messaging (you can still specialise in practice).
Practices that build presence across multiple category entry points see substantially higher growth rates than those focusing on single-point positioning. They don’t change their services—they change their mental availability.
The Brand Synergy Breakdown: Why DIY Undermines Mental Architecture
The reality in most practices is that brand management gets relegated to junior staff who believe they’re creative geniuses. They get loose on Canva, and before the practice knows it, their brand has lost all synergy. Monday’s social media post uses one design approach. Tuesday’s patient newsletter features completely different visual elements. The website hasn’t been updated to match either.
Through Romaniuk’s lens, this isn’t just inconsistency—it’s active destruction of mental availability. Every variation, every “creative interpretation,” every departure from your established assets forces clients’ brains to work harder to recognise you.
The human brain processes familiar patterns exponentially faster than novel ones. When your brand assets constantly shift, you’re forcing potential clients to relearn who you are with every interaction. In a world where decisions happen in milliseconds, that cognitive load is fatal.
This explains why practices with strict brand guidelines consistently outperform those with “flexible” approaches. It’s not about stifling creativity—it’s about respecting how memory actually works. Your distinctive assets need to be distinctive (unique to you) and assets (used consistently over time).
Category Buyer Memory: Measuring What Actually Matters
Most practices measure the wrong things. They track website visits, social media followers, or patient satisfaction scores. But as Romaniuk’s Category Buyer Memory (CBM) framework reveals, these metrics miss the fundamental question: When someone needs your type of service, do they think of you?
CBM tracking for professional services means understanding:
- Which practices come to mind first for specific needs
- How many different situations trigger recall of your practice
- Whether you’re remembered by light buyers (occasional users) or just heavy buyers (regular clients)
The insight that transforms practice growth is this: light buyers—those who rarely need professional services—represent the biggest growth opportunity, yet most practices ignore them entirely. They focus on satisfying existing clients while remaining invisible to the much larger pool of potential clients who only occasionally need their services.
Design for the Category, Analyse for the Buyer, Report for the Brand
Romaniuk’s mantra for brand health measurement perfectly captures what most practices get wrong about understanding their market position:
Design for the Category Stop measuring yourself in isolation. Your brand health metrics should allow comparison with every competitor in your space. If your tracking systems can’t tell you whether potential clients think of you before, alongside, or after competitors, you’re flying blind.
Analyse for the Buyer Forget demographic segmentation. The biggest difference isn’t between male and female clients, or young and old ones—it’s between those who use services like yours frequently and those who rarely need them. Most demographic differences in brand metrics are actually driven by different rates of category buying, not genuine demographic preferences.
Report for the Brand Your metrics should drive strategy, not just document activity. Every measurement should answer: “Does this help us build mental availability?” If not, stop measuring it.
Progress Over Perfection: The Evidence-Based Path Forward
Romaniuk’s recent emphasis on “progress over perfection” is particularly relevant for Australian practices paralysed by regulatory constraints and professional conventions. You don’t need the perfect brand strategy. You need to start building mental availability today, with evidence guiding your way.
This means:
- Testing distinctive assets in small ways before full rollout
- Measuring mental availability regularly, not just client satisfaction
- Making decisions based on buyer behaviour, not professional opinion
- Accepting that broad reach beats narrow targeting for growth
The critical insight here is that most practices put tactics in front and fail to find the time to look at the most fundamentally important facet of their growth: brand and positioning. They chase the latest marketing trend—social media campaigns, email newsletters, Google Ads—without first establishing what their brand represents in buyers’ minds.
The Digital-First Reality: Where First Impressions Are Final
Today’s clients and patients are digital first. They make an assessment of a practice by their brand assets—website, Google Business profile, social media presence—before any human interaction occurs. This digital footprint isn’t supplementary to your brand; in many cases, it IS your brand.
The sophistication of your digital brand presence directly correlates with the sophistication of clients you attract. Premium practices charging premium fees must present premium brands. This doesn’t mean expensive—it means intentional, consistent, and professionally executed.
Yet the reality is that practices often have websites that haven’t been meaningfully updated in years, Google Business profiles with inconsistent information, and social media presences that vary wildly in tone and appearance. Each inconsistency erodes trust and mental availability.
The Compound Effect of Mental Availability
When you commit to building mental availability through distinctive assets and consistent presence across category entry points, the returns compound exponentially. Unlike traditional advertising that delivers diminishing returns, mental availability creates an accelerating advantage.
Each consistent exposure to your distinctive assets strengthens neural pathways. Each category entry point you own multiplies your chances of being considered. Each moment of mental availability increases the probability of being chosen when need arises.
This explains why established brands with strong mental availability can charge premium fees while spending less on marketing. They’ve built cognitive infrastructure that works for them 24/7, even when they’re not actively advertising.
Building Your Practice’s Mental Availability: A Strategic Framework
Audit Your Distinctive Assets
- List every sensory element of your practice
- Identify which are unique to you
- Determine which are consistently used
- Eliminate variations that dilute recognition
Map Your Category Entry Points
- Document every situation that triggers need for your services
- Assess your current presence at each CEP
- Prioritise CEPs based on market size and competition
- Build systematic presence across priority CEPs
Establish Asset Discipline
- Create non-negotiable brand guidelines
- Train every team member on distinctive assets
- Audit all materials quarterly for consistency
- Resist the urge to “refresh” without evidence
Measure Mental Availability
- Track unprompted recall in your category
- Monitor consideration across different CEPs
- Compare your mental availability to competitors
- Use evidence, not intuition, to guide decisions
Build Consistently Across Time
- Commit to distinctive assets for minimum three years
- Increase reach rather than frequency
- Target light buyers, not just heavy users
- Focus on being remembered, not being different
Regulatory Compliance as Brand Foundation
For Australian professional services, regulatory requirements from bodies like AHPRA, ASIC, or various law societies aren’t constraints—they’re foundations for trust-based brand building. Your adherence to these guidelines demonstrates professionalism and commitment to ethical practice.
Rather than viewing compliance as limiting creativity, successful practices integrate regulatory excellence into their brand identity. They make their professional standards part of their distinctive assets, not footnotes in fine print.
The Brutal Truth About Professional Services Brands
Here’s what Romaniuk’s research reveals that most practices don’t want to hear: Your clients don’t think about you nearly as much as you think about yourself. They don’t carefully evaluate your unique value proposition. They don’t appreciate your subtle differentiators. They simply choose from what’s mentally available when they need help.
This isn’t cynical—it’s liberating. You don’t need to be radically different. You don’t need to revolutionise your service offering. You don’t need to find your “why” or craft the perfect mission statement. You need to be consistently present in memory, instantly recognisable, and mentally available when need arises.
The practices thriving in competitive professional services landscape aren’t necessarily the best. They’re the ones that understood early that excellence without mental availability is irrelevance. They’ve invested in distinctive assets, maintained ruthless consistency, and built presence across multiple category entry points.
Conclusion: The Choice That Defines Your Practice’s Future
Every Australian practice faces a fundamental choice. Continue believing that professional excellence alone drives growth, watching as less capable but more mentally available competitors capture your potential clients. Or embrace the evidence-based reality that mental availability, built through distinctive assets and consistent presence, determines who gets chosen.
The implications are profound. This isn’t about adding marketing tactics to your existing approach. It’s about recognising that your practice’s survival depends on occupying mental real estate in potential clients’ minds before they need you. It’s about understanding that being remembered beats being different every single time.
Romaniuk’s research offers a clear path forward: Build distinctive assets. Maintain absolute consistency. Occupy multiple category entry points. Measure mental availability. Make evidence-based decisions. Progress over perfection.
The practices that will dominate the next decade won’t be those chasing differentiation or perfecting their unique value propositions. They’ll be the ones that understood a simple truth: In professional services, as in all categories, mental availability determines market reality. You can’t be chosen if you’re not remembered. And you can’t be remembered if you’re not distinctive, consistent, and mentally available.
The question isn’t whether you agree with this approach. The evidence is overwhelming. The question is whether you’ll act on it before your competitors do. Because while you’re contemplating the perfect brand strategy, they’re building mental availability. And in the battle for clients’ minds, presence beats perfection every time.
Prof Romaniuk and Prof Byron Sharp’s work at Ehrenberg-Bass is a good place to get your head around all this.
