Understand how buyable your brand is today. And what to do to sell more tomorrow.

In today’s hyper-competitive and saturated market, the ultimate truth is that the best brands don’t always win—the most buyable do. It is therefore IMA’s mission to help drive brand Buyability.

Built on the fundamentals of behavioural science, we define Buyability as a brand’s ability to connect with audiences both emotionally and physically so that they win at the point of purchase. Ultimately customers need to buy-in to the brand before they will buy the brand, and we at IMA & Smollan do this by creating connections that people buy.

IMA alongside our owners Smollan are uniquely positioned to help brands achieve this across the whole path to purchase due to our access to market leading services across not only advertising, media and creative but also in store activations, experiences and commerce focused services. Usually you would need to have multiple agency partners to provide an end to end offering from demand to conversion in store and online.

In our research we have seen that brands with a higher Buyability score are the ones performing best in their category. Maximising Buyability is critical today and harder to achieve due to profound consumer fatigue and market chaos. Consumers are grappling with overwhelming choice, with over 600 million products listed on Amazon worldwide. This is compounded by decision fatigue, where people make up to 35,000 decisions a day, leading them to defer, procrastinate, or copy others when a purchase requires effort. Additionally, 49% of UK adults feel their attention span is shorter than it used to be.

Failure to optimise across both the demand and conversion stages of the path to purchase can lead to significant commercial leakage.Failure to bridge the gap between mental availability (Buy In) and physical availability (Buy It) means that brands that score well on mental availability—making people want to buy—are still leaving money on the table if they don’t prioritise physical availability - by being reachable, visible and easily available.

This misalignment creates a Triple Jeopardy:

• Direct Lost Sales: Poor retail execution, like out-of-stocks or friction, directly causes a 4% to 7.4% drop in total sales. (Source: Nielsen IQ)

• Wasted Marketing Spend: Up to 60% of a marketing budget is effectively wasted when demand generated by campaigns cannot be converted at the shelf due to physical friction. (Source: Kantar)

• Fuelling Competitors: When faced with out-of-stocks, over 40% of shoppers permanently switch brands, actively funding your competitors’ customer acquisition. (Source: Kantar)

IMA’s Solution: The Buyability Index powered by The M.O.R.E. Buyable Framework

To maximise sales and minimise this commercial leakage, IMA has created the M.O.R.E. Buyable Framework. This is a unique, holistic methodology that enables us to assess brand Buyability vs their competitive set across both the demand stage (Buy In) and conversion stage (Buy It). The M.O.R.E. framework assesses a brand's performance across four core, measurable pillars:

• Meaningful (Buy In/Demand Stage): Does the brand matter, earning a connection with the consumer?

• Outstanding (Buy In/Demand Stage): Is the brand remarkable, seen, and remembered, standing out from the competition?

• Reachable (Buying/Conversion Stage): Is the product readily available, easy to find, and hard to miss?

• Easy (Buying/Conversion Stage): Is the experience frictionless, consistent and engaging?

These M.O.R.E. criteria form the basis of the IMA Buyability Index™, an indexed score that aggregates these four pillars using consistent, repeatable UK data points to provide clear direction on how to improve sales performance.

Crucially, the Index is validated against sales performance. Analysis across 51 brands from 7 categories demonstrated a high average correlation of 0.79 between a brand's Buyability score and its Share of Market (SOM). This strong link allows IMA to move beyond diagnosis to prediction, helping to estimate the likely sales impact of improving specific M.O.R.E. levers.

In summary, our clients receive a clear six-step process to maximize their potential: an assessment against the competitive set, a determination of their personal Buyability Index score, diagnosis of their strategic priorities, strategy deployment, and ongoing tracking to validate the impact on buyability indicators and ultimately business performance. IMA’s approach provides a unique, holistic view that bridges demand (Buy In) and conversion (Buy It) to drive long-term business growth.

The trusted data sources behind the Buyability Index.