06 July 2025
Based on the work done by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute (University of South Australia) —the “Laws of Growth” are a set of empirical regularities that describe how brands grow (or don’t) market share and sales over time. Here we describe the 5 laws providing a description of each and how they can be applied to B2B marketing.
LAW 1: Mental Availability
The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute has coined the term "mental availability" which most marketers would call "brand awareness".
However, mental availability is not just awareness re-labelled . It deepens the concept, focusing on the probability of being recalled across all relevant buying contexts, the richness of memory structures, and a clean separation from attitudes—making it a more powerful predictor of real purchase behavior than classic awareness measures.
Mental availability is the ease with which your brand comes to mind in buying situations where a purchase of your category is triggered (e.g., “I need a snack,” “I need to upgrade my phone”). Brands with high mental availability are more likely to be thought of at the moment of purchase. Advertising, distinctive assets (logos, colors, packaging) and broadly-targeted reach all build mental availability.
Measuring brand awareness: In simple terms you would measure brand awareness through unaided recall e.g. "can you list suppliers of product X?" or aided recognition scores from surveys by asking "which of the following brands are you familiar with?"
Measuring mental availability: questions would be context specific using cue-based recall tests (“When you think of an afternoon snack, which brands come to mind?”) and memory-structure tracking: the number and strength of distinct associations people have with your brand (e.g., via brand-lift studies, implicit association tests).
Higher awareness gives you more “eyes on logo.” Whereas Higher mental availability wires your brand into the very moments and contexts where purchase thinking happens—so you’re not just known, you’re remembered at the right time.
APPLICATION TO B2B
Mental Availability → Buyer-Committee Awareness
B2B companies famously spend little on building brand awareness let alone mental availability preferring instead to focus investment on purchasers who are in-market now, whereas they should be investing in both. B2B buyers (particularly when procuring big ticket items) are risk averse and tend to steer toward known brands.
Building Mental Availability increases the effectiveness of...
- Lead generation promotion: promotional spend focused on prospects who are currently in market.
- Sales activity: warms-up sales conversations. Sales people will find their efforts to make initial contact and conduct sales meetings easier if they are identified as being from a known brand company.
- Getting on the consideration list: and increases the probability that you will be invited to quote or respond to RFPs.
- Proposal evaluations: Further, when evaluating your proposal, members of the buying committee will value your proposal more because known brands are less risky.
- Improved margins: better recognized brands and brands that are better recognized for solving particular problems need to compete less on price.
In B2B, a purchase decision often involves multiple roles (end-users, technical buyers, procurement, finance). To drive growth build mental availability not only with your champion but across the full committee. Tailor content (case studies, ROI calculators, executive briefs) so your brand springs to mind at each stage—from problem definition to sign-off.
LAW 2: Double Jeopardy
Smaller brands not only have fewer buyers, they also suffer from lower loyalty—so they’re “doubly jeopardized.” This explains why struggling brands can’t simply “boost loyalty” to grow. Growth almost always comes from recruiting more light and occasional buyers, not squeezing more repeat purchase out of the few you already have.
APPLICATION TO B2B
Double Jeopardy → Scale Drives Loyalty
Smaller suppliers aren’t just chosen by fewer clients—they also see each client buy less often or less deeply.
Don’t pin your growth hopes on boosting repeat spend among your handful of large accounts. Instead, focus on broadening your account base (penetration) with light or occasional buyers: focus promotional spend to build awareness and drive enquiry, offer pilot programs, proof-of-concept offers, and provide turnkey solutions to recruit more logos.
LAW 3: Duplication of purchase
Customers who buy your brand also buy competing brands. The overlap in buyers between any two brands in the same category is remarkably predictable: bigger brands share more customers with everyone else, smaller share fewer. It underlines that purchase behavior is probabilistic and that “owning” a customer exclusively is rare. This law helps explain portfolio effects and why brands can coexist.
APPLICATION TO B2B
Duplication of Purchase → Embrace Portfolio Buying
B2B customers often buy overlapping solutions (e.g., multiple software modules, several component vendors).
Aim to be part of their “shopping basket” alongside incumbents. Cross-sell adjacent product lines, bundle integrations that lock in your solution alongside others, and recognize that “exclusivity” is rare—even if you’re not their sole supplier, you still capture share of wallet.
LAW 4: Buyer Moderation
Heavy buyers of a category buy slightly less next time, and light buyers buy slightly more; over time, everyone “moderates” toward the category average purchase rate. It shows that extremes in buying frequency tend to smooth out—so chasing ever-higher loyalty among your heaviest buyers has diminishing returns.
APPLICATION TO B2B
Buyer Moderation → Expect Usage Fluctuations
Heavy users of a service (e.g., a high-volume manufacturing client) may scale back in a downturn, while smaller users ramp up trial usage.
Build flexible pricing tiers and consumption-based models to capture growing end-users, while maintaining engagement programs for lapsed or light users. Monitor usage patterns and re-engage customers whose buying has dipped.
LAW 5: Physical Availability
How easy it is for buyers to find and buy your brand in the real world—distribution, shelf presence, pack sizes, e-commerce visibility. You only sell if you’re available at the moment of purchase need. Even the best mental availability won’t help if the product isn’t in the shopper’s path.
APPLICATION TO B2B
Physical Availability → Seamless Procurement Access
“Availability” in B2B isn’t about shelf-space but about how easy you make it for a customer to buy you—approved-vendor status, contract vehicles, integration with their procurement systems.
Secure placements on preferred-supplier lists, offer streamlined quoting tools, embed in e-procurement catalogs or punch-out systems so there’s zero friction when they’re ready to order.
How They Fit Together
Penetration Drives Growth: New buyers (penetration) are the primary source of incremental sales.
Mental + Physical Availability: Mental availability brings you to mind in high-value problem solving context; physical availability lets the purchase happen.
Double Jeopardy & Duplication: Help you understand why loyalty programs have limited power and why brands share buyers.
Putting the Growth Laws to Work
Broad Reach Advertising: Build mental availability among light and non-buyers.
Wide Distribution: Ensure you’re easy to buy wherever the category is shopped.
Distinctive Branding: Use consistent assets so buyers quickly spot “your” pack in a sea of choices.
Category-focused Messages: Remind people when the buying occasion arises, not just sell features.
Core Takeaways for B2B Marketers
Prioritize Penetration Over “Loyalty Hacks”: Growth comes from recruiting more accounts, not from squeezing incremental spend from the most active few.
Map Your Distinctive Assets to Buying Roles: Use targeted touch points—technical whitepapers for engineers, business-case decks for executives—to ensure your brand pops into each stakeholder’s mind.
Optimize Availability in Every Purchasing Channel: From RFQ portals to contract-management platforms, make it frictionless to find, evaluate, and buy your offerings.
Design for Overlap: Recognize that customers will mix and match vendors; structure bundles and integrations to ensure you’re always “in the basket.”
