How B2B Brands Grow

Great marketing helps drive sustainable growth for companies.

Great marketing not only helps companies grow, great marketing also helps marketers grow sales, budgets, and teams too.

In an effort to help B2B marketers sustainably grow their brands and careers, we’ve partnered with the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute to publish a series of papers on How B2B Brands Grow:

B2B Institute Introduction: We outline how these laws come together and the key ideas B2B marketers should take away from this compendium.
Mental and Physical Availability: Byron Sharp explains why mental availability is so important in this foreword to our compendium.
The Double Jeopardy Law: Jenni Romaniuk, John Dawes, and Sahar Faghidno explains why customer acquisition determines both company growth and customer loyalty.
The Duplicate Purchase Law: Jenni Romaniuk explains why buyers who buy small brands are also more likely to buy big as well, but the reverse is not true.
B2B Brand Rejection: Jenni Romaniuk explains why lack of brand awareness is a much bigger problem than negative perception for a B2B brand.
The 95-5 Rule: John Dawes explains why to prioritize the 95% of "out-market" buyers who pay a company future cash flows.

To see how all these ideas come together, read our B2B Institute case study, How Salesforce’s Trailblazer Campaign Builds Mental Availability, based on our Taking The Long View Interview with Salesforce’s SVP of Global Brand, Colin Fleming.

Mental Availability

The job of marketing is to make sure your brand is easy to mind and easy to find. The Mental Availability Law outlines how to make your brand easy to mind by creating brand awareness in relevant buying situations.
The Double Jeopardy Law

The Double Jeopardy Law states that loyalty is a function of penetration, so the only path for sustainable growth is through customer acquisition. Our research with Ehrenberg-Bass shows that this law holds true across B2C and B2B.
The Duplicate Purchase Law

Research in hundreds of product categories reveals a consistent pattern: within any product category the buyers will purchase from multiple brands. If you look at any one brand, more of its buyers will also be buying the bigger brands in the category and fewer will also be buying the smaller brands.
The 95-5 Rule

The majority of your customers are out-market at any given time. The key to growing your customer base and cash flows is to prioritize out-market, brand marketing over time.
B2B Brand Rejection

Lack of brand awareness is a much bigger problem than active rejection of a B2B brand. This means efforts to reduce rejection levels are likely to have low return on investment in sales growth and brands should Instead focus marketing efforts on reaching potential B2B buyers to build mental availability.

How B2B Brands Grow

The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute Brings Marketing Science To B2B

How B2B Brands Grow

Report Readout

Ready to apply B2B Institute principles to your marketing strategy?