Most of what founders are taught about brand growth is inherited wisdom that sounds right and falls apart under data. Differentiate or die. Find your niche and own it. Build a loyal tribe of superfans. Identify your ideal customer avatar and speak directly to them. These ideas dominate startup culture, marketing courses, and agency pitch decks. They feel intuitive. And decades of empirical brand research, the largest body of evidence on how brands grow, contradicts nearly all of them.
The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute (EBI) at the University of South Australia has been studying buyer behaviour and brand growth across dozens of categories and markets since the 1960s. Their research, popularised by Byron Sharp in How Brands Grow, is built on observed data, not theory. What the data shows is consistent, replicable, and uncomfortable for anyone who has built a marketing strategy around the ideas above.
This article is a primer on what EBI research actually says, translated for founders who are making brand and marketing decisions right now. The concepts here form the backbone of how I approach brand strategy. They’re also the reason most brand advice you’ll find online, including from very expensive agencies, is built on assumptions the evidence doesn’t support.
The two things that drive brand growth
EBI research identifies two drivers that explain the vast majority of brand growth across categories: mental availability and physical availability. Everything else, the storytelling, the campaigns, the content, the positioning, is either building one of these two things or it’s noise.
Mental availability is the probability that a buyer thinks of your brand when they enter a buying situation. Not brand awareness in the abstract (“have you heard of X?”), but the likelihood that the brand comes to mind at the moment of decision. A patron considering which foundation to support, a creative director choosing a strategic partner for a rebrand, a CEO evaluating firms to reshape the company’s market position, in that moment, which brands surface in their mind? Mental availability determines whether you make the consideration set at all.
Mental availability is built through broad, consistent, distinctive communication over time. Each of those words matters. Broad, because you need to reach beyond your existing customers. Consistent, because memory structures decay and need constant refreshing. Distinctive, because the communication needs to be linked to your brand specifically, not to the category in general. And over time, because mental availability is a cumulative asset, not something a single campaign creates.
Physical availability is how easy the brand is to find and buy in the moments that matter. Distribution, shelf presence, digital findability, search visibility, ease of purchase, checkout friction, delivery speed, every step between “I want this” and “I bought this.” A brand can have strong mental availability and still lose the sale if the buyer can’t find it, can’t access it, or encounters too much friction in the buying process.
These two work together. Mental availability gets you into the buyer’s mind. Physical availability gets you into their hands. Growth requires both. A brand that invests heavily in awareness but neglects distribution creates demand it can’t capture. A brand with excellent distribution but low mental availability depends entirely on being found by accident. The strategic question is always: which of these two is the binding constraint right now, and what’s the most efficient way to build it?
All brands share buyers (and why that changes everything)
One of EBI’s most disruptive findings is the Duplication of Purchase law: all brands in a category share their buyers with competitors, and the degree of sharing is proportional to market share. Your customers also buy from your competitors. Your competitors’ customers also buy from you. The overlap is predictable, consistent, and well-documented across categories.
This means that brand loyalty, in the way most marketers think about it, is largely a statistical artefact. Bigger brands have more “loyal” customers because they have more customers, period. The purchase frequency among a brand’s buyer base is remarkably similar across competitors in the same category. The difference between the market leader and a smaller brand is almost entirely driven by how many buyers each brand has, not by how devoted those buyers are.
This is the Double Jeopardy law: smaller brands suffer twice. They have fewer buyers, and those buyers purchase slightly less frequently. The penalty is mathematical, not emotional. It’s a function of penetration, not of how much people love the brand.
For founders, this reframes the growth question entirely. The path to growth runs through acquiring new buyers and increasing penetration, not through making existing customers more loyal. Loyalty programmes, retention funnels, and hyper-targeted messaging to existing customers all have their place, but they are not growth engines. Growth comes from reaching the people who don’t currently buy from you, including the light category buyers who purchase infrequently and look like low-value targets on a dashboard.
Category entry points: the doors into your brand
Buyers don’t think about brands in a vacuum. They think about them in response to specific triggers: a need, a situation, an occasion. These are category entry points (CEPs), the moments that pull a buyer into the category and activate the mental search for a solution.
For a brand strategy practice, CEPs might include: “the company just closed a funding round and the investor asked what the brand stands for,” “a luxury hospitality group is expanding into a new market and the existing positioning no longer fits,” “a foundation is preparing a major public campaign and realises the brand doesn’t carry the gravitas the moment requires.” Each of these is a door into the category. In each of these moments, the buyer’s mind retrieves whatever brands are linked to that specific situation.
Brand strategy should identify the CEPs that matter most in the category, map which ones the brand is currently linked to, and build communication that strengthens those links over time. The goal is to be linked to as many relevant CEPs as possible, because each link is another situation where the brand can come to mind.
Most brands are linked to one or two CEPs at best. They’ve built their communication around a single use case or a single buyer persona, and they come to mind in that one scenario. The brands that grow are linked to many, because they’ve deliberately expanded the range of situations where the brand can surface. This is one of the highest-leverage activities in brand strategy, and one of the least understood.
CEPs also reveal competitive dynamics. Some entry points are strongly owned by a dominant player, making them expensive to contest. Others are unclaimed, which represents an opportunity. And some are growing in importance because the category itself is evolving. Mapping this landscape is strategic work. It tells you where to invest your communication, where to compete, and where to find open space.
Distinctive brand assets: getting remembered as you
Mental availability depends on the buyer linking the right associations to the right brand. This is where distinctive brand assets (DBAs) come in. DBAs are the sensory cues, visual, verbal, auditory, that allow a buyer to identify the brand without seeing the name. Colour, logo shape, tagline, sonic identity, a specific layout pattern, a character, a typeface, packaging structure.
The critical word is “distinctive,” which is different from “differentiated.” Differentiation is about meaning: we stand for something different than our competitor. Distinctiveness is about memory: a buyer can recognise us instantly and link the impression to the right brand. Both matter, but distinctiveness is the one that gets systematically undervalued in most brand work.
A brand can have a beautifully differentiated positioning and still fail to grow because its assets look, sound, and feel like everything else in the category, or because the assets are wrongly out of place, signalling a purchase occasion or market tier the brand doesn’t actually serve. Every ad impression, every touchpoint, every moment of visibility is an opportunity to build memory, but only if the buyer’s brain can encode the impression and link it to the correct brand. When your visual system overlaps with a competitor’s, when your colour palette is the same blue as the category leader, when your layout patterns mirror the market default, you’re spending your marketing budget to strengthen someone else’s memory structures.
DBA strategy involves identifying which assets the brand currently owns, testing how uniquely they’re associated with the brand versus the category, and then consistently deploying the strongest ones across every touchpoint. It also requires mapping the competitor’s assets to find clear space. The goal is owning a set of cues that are uniquely, immediately, and reliably linked to your brand in the buyer’s memory.
What most marketing advice gets wrong
If EBI’s research is the map, most mainstream marketing advice is driving in the opposite direction. A few of the biggest disconnects:
“Focus on your niche.” The data shows that brands grow by reaching more people, including light buyers and non-buyers. Hyper-targeting a narrow segment feels efficient and produces tidy metrics, but it caps the brand’s ceiling. The brands that scale are the ones that broaden their reach while maintaining distinctiveness, not the ones that burrow deeper into a micro-audience.
“Build a loyal tribe.” Loyalty is largely a function of penetration, not passion. Bigger brands appear more “loyal” because they have more buyers. Investing disproportionately in loyalty and retention while neglecting acquisition is one of the most common growth traps for founder-led businesses. The uncomfortable truth is that most of your future growth will come from people who barely know you right now.
“Differentiate or die.” Differentiation matters, but distinctiveness matters more for growth. A brand can have a highly differentiated value proposition and still fail to grow because buyers can’t pick it out of a lineup. The strategic priority is being easy to notice and easy to remember, not being conceptually unique. Plenty of successful brands occupy similar positioning territory and grow fine, because their assets are distinct enough that buyers can tell them apart and link impressions to the right one.
“ROI is the only metric that matters.” Short-term ROI measurement systematically undervalues brand building. Performance marketing is visible, measurable, and feels accountable. Brand building is slow, diffuse, and hard to attribute. But the empirical evidence is consistent: brands that shift budget too heavily toward performance and away from brand building erode their mental availability over time, and eventually the performance campaigns stop working too, because there’s no brand memory left to activate.
What this means if you’re a founder
EBI’s research was built on data from large brands in large categories. The question founders rightly ask is: does this apply to me?
The principles apply universally. The laws of buyer behaviour, duplication of purchase, double jeopardy, the role of mental and physical availability, these are empirical patterns that describe how buyers behave, regardless of the brand’s size. A 10-person company and a 10,000-person company operate in the same cognitive environment. Buyers still make decisions based on what comes to mind and what’s easy to buy.
The adoption, though, changes completely at different scales. And this is where most people misapply EBI.
For mass-market brands with large budgets, the philosophy is relatively straightforward: invest in reach, build distribution, deploy distinctive assets at scale. They have the leverage to compete on breadth. A founder-led business with a 2–3% market share does not. It can’t buy mass reach the way PepsiCo can. It can’t out-distribute a category leader. And the temptation to copy what large brands do, because PepsiCo did it and it worked, is one of the most common strategic traps. The principles hold. The playbook doesn’t transfer.
This is where nuance matters. EBI’s research is sceptical of traditional positioning and segmentation at scale, and rightly so: the data shows that narrow targeting limits growth. But for a small brand, positioning and segmentation are survival tools. A brand at 3% market share can’t afford to speak to everyone in the category. It has to choose where to compete, which category entry points to prioritise, which associations to build first, because it doesn’t have the resources to build all of them at once. The art is knowing which EBI principles to apply at full strength right now, and which ones become more relevant as the brand scales over the next three to five years.
Nassim Taleb’s concept of antifragility is useful here. Taleb argues that the organisms and systems that thrive under stress are the ones that are small enough and flexible enough to adapt quickly. Fragile systems, the rigid ones, the over-optimised ones, break under pressure. The antifragile ones gain from it.
This maps directly onto brand strategy for smaller businesses. The advantage of a founder-led brand is agility. You can test, learn, pivot, and redeploy faster than any large organisation. You can spot a shift in the competitive landscape and respond in weeks, not quarters. You can experiment with which CEPs to link to, which assets to invest in, which channels to prioritise, without the bureaucratic drag that slows larger competitors. The brands that grow from small to large are the ones that use this agility strategically, applying EBI’s evidence-based principles with the speed and flexibility that only a lean organisation can sustain.
The founders who struggle most are the ones locked into rigid strategies, whether that’s a narrow niche they refuse to expand beyond, a loyalty-driven model that caps acquisition, or an ROI-obsessed media plan that starves the brand of the broad reach it needs. Rigidity is fragility. The evidence gives you the destination. Agility is how a small brand gets there.
I work with EBI’s frameworks directly, adapted to the scale, stage, and category of each business. The strategic question is never “what would a big brand do?” but “what do the principles say, and how does this specific business apply them given where it is right now?” Psychology and neuroscience on how people actually make choices sit alongside the data, because understanding why buyers behave the way EBI documents helps make the strategy actionable at any scale.
