The Hidden Gap That Kills Customer Decisions

You’ve spent a lot on advertising.

Your team has crafted a powerful message. Customers know your name. They might even like your brand.

Then, at the moment of truth—standing in a store aisle, scrolling a website, or talking to a salesperson—they choose someone else.

All that time, money, and energy, wasted in the last three feet.

This is the situation that keeps leaders up at night. It’s why you can feel overwhelmed, knowing that after all the work, your company is still just another choice in the market.

The problem isn’t usually your message. It’s the gap between what you promise and how easy you make it for people to buy.

Great brands aren't just built on being remembered. They are built on being available.

This core strategy has two parts that must work together.

• Mental Availability: This is what most marketing focuses on. It’s getting your brand to pop into a customer’s head when they have a need. It’s your creative ads and your reputation.

• Physical Availability: This is the other, often forgotten, half. It’s making your brand easy to find and buy the moment a customer is ready to act. It's your operations, your distribution, and your user experience.

Leaders love to focus on mental availability because it’s exciting. But the world’s best brands know that a brilliant message is useless if the product is a hassle to buy.

A key part of getting customers to prefer you is making it easy for them to choose you.

P&G: The Masters of Being There

No one gets this better than Procter & Gamble. They build billion-dollar brands by mastering both sides of the availability coin. Kirti Singh, an executive at P&G, says this is fundamental to their brand strategy.

In his words:

For P&G, it's not enough that you think of Tide when you think of laundry. They work to make sure Tide is right there on the shelf, in the right size and at the right price, when you’re in the store.

They remove every possible roadblock between your thought and your purchase.

Coca-Cola: The Path from Ubiquity to Emotion

Many marketers see Coke's famous ads, like "Open Happiness," and get the wrong idea.

They believe the brand's success was built on selling emotions.

The truth is the other way around. The emotional branding was the final layer, only made possible after decades of relentless, practical work.

The brand's foundation was laid by its former president, Robert W. Woodruff. His strategy was simple and based in operations: make Coca-Cola "within an arm's reach of desire." This drove a huge global investment in bottling and distribution.

Long before they sold "happiness," they mastered being physically available.

It was this ubiquity that allowed Coke to become part of people's lives. It was present at backyard barbecues and movie theaters—places where people were already happy.

The brand didn't create a feeling from scratch; it just made sure Coke was there when good feelings were already happening. The advertising came later, reinforcing an emotion that was already real for their customers.

Here's the lesson many new brands miss: your first job is to sell the product's value and get it into as many hands as possible. You can only successfully sell an abstract feeling once it reinforces an emotion people are already having at scale.

Wide distribution must come before the high-concept emotion.

Amazon: Weaponizing Digital Availability

This idea is just as powerful online.

Amazon built an empire by making buying things incredibly easy. In the early days of e-commerce, buying something meant filling out lots of forms with your name, address, and credit card number.

Amazon’s famous "1-Click" ordering changed everything. It was a direct attack on the hassle that kills sales.

They knew that every extra step was a chance for a customer to get distracted. By saving user information, Amazon made buying take almost zero effort. Prime shipping did the same thing for the stress of waiting.

They made being a customer so easy that other sites felt slow and clunky.

Amazon’s brand became known for speed and ease, a promise built on mastering physical availability online.

Liquid Death: The Myth of the Hype-Driven Unicorn

It’s easy to look at a new brand like Liquid Death and think its success comes only from its edgy, viral marketing. The common story is that they won because of brilliant ads.

That story is incomplete.

Their marketing made them famous. But their business success came from a step-by-step plan to make the product easier to find. The viral ads created a fast car, but their distribution network was the highway that let them conquer the market.

Their journey offers a powerful, modern playbook:

• Step 1: Prove Demand First. Before making a lot of product, the founder spent just $1,500 on a funny video. It went viral, proved people were interested, and helped secure the money to start production.

• Step 2: Start in the Right Places. In 2019, they didn’t launch in major stores. They started only in bars and tattoo parlors. This put the brand in the hands of the right people and proved it was a cool option in social settings.

• Step 3: Secure an Anchor Store. The buzz from their small launch and online sales helped them land a national deal with Whole Foods in 2020. It was a huge hit, quickly becoming the top-selling water brand on their shelves and proving it had mainstream appeal.

• Step 4: Expand Everywhere. From there, they launched a retail blitz, going from 16,000 stores in 2021 to over 133,000 by 2024. This growth in stores directly matched their growth in revenue.

The genius of Liquid Death was not in choosing branding over distribution. It was in understanding that the two are deeply connected and using one to fuel the other.

How to Close Your Brand's Gap

Is your business making it harder than it needs to be for your best customers to choose you?

Use these questions to check your own "last three feet":

1. Where does the real decision happen? Don't guess. You have to go there, in person or online. Map out the exact moment your customer chooses. Is it on a confusing webpage? In a talk with a salesperson who isn't well trained?

2. What is their "workaround"? How do customers solve their problem now? If their current fix is "good enough" and much easier than buying from you, you don't have a messaging problem. You have an availability problem.

3. How many clicks or steps does it take? Be honest. Count every single step from interest to ownership. Where can you remove a step? Your goal is to make choosing you the easiest path.

4. Are you where they want to be? Your customers are already shopping in places they trust. Are you forcing them to come to you? Are they looking for your product in stores that don't carry it?

Sustainable growth doesn't always come from a flashier ad campaign. Often, it comes from a disciplined effort to make your brand incredibly easy to buy.

When you build a bridge across those last three feet, you don't just get remembered. You get chosen.

But getting chosen once is only the beginning.

The moment after the sale is your brand’s most fragile and important opportunity. This is when the customer is looking for a sign they made the right choice.

The experience of actually using your product is what matters. Physical availability makes that experience possible. It’s what cements your brand in a customer's mind for the future.

This is where a single sale starts to become a powerful buying habit.

Onward,

Aaron Shields

P.S. Is there a gap between how much customers know your brand and how often they choose it? That gap is costing you sales. Reply to this email, and let's set up a free 15-minute call to find the friction points in your customer's journey.