Making Meaning Stick: How Semiotics Builds the Memory Structures Behind Byron Sharp’s “Mental Availability” and Explains Why Some Brand Cues Become Culturally Viscous

Sarah Johnson

Byron Sharp’s influential theory of brand growth argues that success depends on “mental availability”: being easily and frequently retrieved from memory in buying situations. Yet his model is largely structural, describing what happens in networks of memory, not how meaning attaches and endures within them.

This presentation proposes Semiotics as the missing interpretive dimension. Semiotics explains the processes through which brands create and maintain meaning: the way cultural codes, archetypes, and sensory forms become thickened and emotionally resonant. In semiotic terms, Sharp’s “memory nodes” are not neutral; they are saturated with signs, metaphors, and myths that make them memorable and motivational.

The presentation will interweave:

• A concise theoretical framing linking Sharp’s network theory to Peircean and Barthesian semiotics;

• Case examples from branding and communication showing how certain semiotic systems (e.g., Apple’s minimalism, Coca-Cola’s happiness, or sensory accessibility cues in travel and care brands) achieve “viscosity” — meaning that clings, resists, and endures;

• A practical model for marketers and semioticians to collaborate in building, auditing, and refreshing brand meaning structures.

Ultimately, this paper argues that mental availability is not merely cognitive recall but semiotic adhesion: the product of culturally charged meaning structures that hold brands in memory and imagination.