The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute is the world’s largest centre for research into marketing.
It has spent twenty years studying how brands really grow, building on foundational research that began forty years before that, across every market, category, and company size, from businesses turning over $250,000 to those exceeding $45 billion. We introduce the evidence-based key principles with a single, succinct sentence they coined themselves.
For as many people as possible, be easy to mind and easy to find.
You may well have heard a version of that sentence before, but we find it genuinely starts to mean something when it's applied to a scenario you might recognise. We've seen a pattern play out across a number of client engagements over the past year, involving the kind of business that hasn't had reason to meaningfully consider brand activity in recent times, until now. Looking at those challenges through this lens has helped drive the best path forward.
But if you're not familiar with the terminology, here's a quick overview.
For as many people as possible, be easy to mind and easy to find.
Mental availability is the likelihood that a customer thinks of you at the right time, just when they develop a need or want for what you sell. It is not the same as awareness. A person can know who you are and still not have established the category trigger associations that make them think of you when it matters.
Physical availability is the extent to which you've removed the friction between a customer who's ready to buy and the act of buying itself. Being visible where people consider, shop and buy is one part of it; making the decision and process of buying as easy as possible is the other.
Building both is how brands have been proven to grow, and doing it for as many people as possible determines the impact on the bottom line.
The pattern we've been seeing
Over the past 18 months, we've had a version of the same conversation with several clients facing a similar challenge.
Generally long-standing B2B businesses, and good ones. They've achieved growth for years the way many in their categories have: winning work primarily through reputation, supported by performance media that makes them findable to those searching for them and discoverable to those seeking the category or competitors. Their success to date is evidence of a sound approach.
The conversations began for a few different reasons. For example, a big tender missed because customer knowledge was out of date (a good reputation that held inaccuracies), or a new market challenge where reputation was near zero. Elsewhere, dominance in an established, competitive and ultimately saturated search category meant cost-effective, scalable growth simply wasn't available to be bought.
In every case, reputation plus performance was no longer the biggest lever to pull for ongoing growth.
None of these cases involved a performance problem that needed fixing. For two of them, the barrier sat in reputation; for the other, they'd hit a performance ceiling. There are always small optimisations and gains to be found, but fewer significant or permanent ones.
Where the Ehrenberg-Bass lens comes into play
We turn mental and physical availability into a diagnostic tool.
We split our clients' marketing ecosystems into three parts: generating mental availability in the wider market (often termed "generating demand," though it's not quite that linear), capturing demand once it appears by being easy to find, and converting that demand once someone's reached the site or sales team by being easy to buy.
Performance channels, what's most actively driven growth for these clients in recent years, do that second part well. They're built to capture people already looking, but they aren't effective at the first part: making more customers look for our clients' brands from the outset.
For most of these businesses, mental availability has existed at whatever level their reputation happened to build over the years, rather than any deliberate investment, at least in recent times. It's rarely been the biggest constraint, until performance is saturated, the business has changed in some way and reputation hasn't kept up, or they enter a market where they have no reputation.
The third part, being easy to buy once found, is frequently the most overlooked opportunity of the three, for exactly the businesses in this pattern. When reputation and performance media have always been "enough," the potential for growth from CX and UX improvements rarely gets treated as a growth lever.
How we actually use this with clients
When we see this pattern, the process looks roughly the same each time.
We start by looking at the data. None of this works without accurate, comprehensive data connecting activity to outcomes across the funnel, not just channel-level metrics. It's often the first gap we find, and usually the first thing we help put in place, because a diagnosis is only as good as what it's built on.
That data helps us map the client's current marketing activity against the two sides of the EBI model: what's being done to build mental availability, and what's being done to build physical availability, in both its forms.
Then we audit the category itself, to test whether performance genuinely has reached saturation or whether there's more headroom than it looks like from the inside. If real, permanent gains are still there through spend and optimisation, that's usually the faster and cheaper next step. Often, though, what's left is maintenance: work and budget required to hold position, not to add to it.
From there, we weigh the two remaining levers, brand and conversion, against each other. Which would move the needle fastest, which would move it furthest, and what it would actually take to do properly. Sometimes the answer is one or the other. Often it's both, run in a sequence that reflects which pays back first.
We've run this diagnostic with several long-standing clients who've agreed, for the first time, to fund always-on brand activity alongside performance. Those campaigns are being built now and launching soon; we'll have more to say about the impact on performance efficiency and business outcomes once they've been active for a period.
None of this is reserved for businesses in this exact position, it's the lens we bring to every client's marketing, brand and performance alike. This pattern is simply the clearest, truest example we can point to right now of why it matters.
For as many people as possible, be easy to mind and easy to find. The businesses in this pattern have proactively built real strength in being found. What's usually gone untouched is being recalled, by more people, before the search even starts, and being effortless to buy once someone arrives. Either can be the next phase of growth. Sometimes it's both.
If this sounds like where your business is at, or you just like the way this framework thinks about growth, we'd love to chat.
