Growth: Obey the forces you wish to command!

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24 Jul

TLDR;-) Most growth failures are misdiagnosis failures. Organisations invest in tactics — retention programmes, channel experiments, sales hires — before establishing the upstream conditions that make those tactics work. Ehrenberg-Bass Institute research demonstrates that sustainable growth depends on a specific set of structural conditions: mental availability, physical availability, distinctive assets, and category entry points. These are not marketing preferences. They are upstream dependencies. Investing in the wrong layer first doesn't just waste money. It produces misleading signals that justify the next round of wrong investment.

Your growth initiative is failing. You've run the A/B tests, hired the agency, and refreshed the brand. The pipeline still doesn't move the way the board expects.

The problem is probably not execution. It's classification.

Growth work has a sequencing structure. The tactics that get the most attention, the channel experiments, the loyalty programmes, the sales playbooks, depend on upstream conditions that most organisations haven't established. When those conditions are absent, tactical investment produces noise. The team reads the noise as evidence that the tactics are wrong and tries different ones. The cycle repeats.

Understanding why this happens requires distinguishing between the forces that actually drive growth and the visible activities that are most often mistaken for them.

The science organisations ignore

In 1994, Andrew Ehrenberg documented a market regularity so robust it holds across categories, countries, and decades: brands grow primarily by acquiring new customers, not by deepening relationships with existing ones. The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute at the University of South Australia has since spent thirty years replicating and extending this finding. The conclusion is consistent. Penetration drives growth. Loyalty follows penetration. It does not produce it.

This has a specific implication that most organisations resist. The Double Jeopardy Law, which Ehrenberg first formalised and which holds across virtually every category studied, shows that smaller brands suffer twice: fewer customers and lower loyalty from those customers. The loyalty gap is a consequence of size, not a cause of smallness. Investing in loyalty to escape it inverts the causal chain.

Byron Sharp's How Brands Grow (2010) built on this foundation to identify the structural conditions that enable penetration. Two are primary. Mental availability: the brand is recalled when a category need arises. Physical availability: the brand can be found and bought when the need is acted on. Two are enabling. Category entry points: the specific triggers, contexts, and moments that activate purchase. Distinctive brand assets: the colours, sounds, shapes, and phrases that make the brand recognisable without the name.

These are not marketing theories. They are observed regularities in how markets behave. Mars applied them directly. Revenue grew from $25 billion to $35 billion. Snickers, a brand eighty years old at the time, delivered double-digit growth. The gains came not from a product reformulation or a loyalty programme, but from rebuilding mental and physical availability systematically.

The science is available. The question is why organisations don't use it.

Downstream gravity

The answer is sequencing. More precisely, it's the pull toward downstream work before upstream prerequisites are established.

I call this downstream gravity in my diagnostic work with founders and corporate innovation teams. The pull is toward visible, activity-rich work at the layer where effort feels most like progress. Pipeline feels like progress. Channel optimisation feels like progress. The problem is that visible activity at the wrong layer produces misleading signals. A sales team struggling to convert isn't necessarily failing at selling. It may be operating before positioning is clear, before evidence is packaged, before the organisation's mental availability in its target market is established. The sales problem is a symptom. The root cause is upstream.

The pattern holds symmetrically for growth at scale. A brand investing in loyalty programmes when its penetration is low isn't managing customers well. It's investing in the wrong layer. The loyalty investment absorbs budget, generates activity data, and produces marginal returns that get interpreted as evidence that "loyalty programmes don't work" rather than as evidence that penetration hasn't been established.

Every major growth methodology has this structure. Ehrenberg-Bass research shows the mechanism by which brands reach new buyers. But it assumes the brand has mental availability: buyers can recall it when the need arises. If mental availability hasn't been built, reach is wasted. The message lands, and nothing sticks, because the brand has no existing mental structure to attach to.

This is an upstream dependency, not a media planning problem.

The three structural conditions that gate growth

The Ehrenberg-Bass research points to three conditions that must be established before growth tactics produce reliable returns. Most organisations treat these as campaign objectives. They are pre-campaign prerequisites.

Mental availability at category entry points. Buyers do not think about brands continuously. They think about them in specific moments: "I need a ride." "My team needs a project tool." "We're replacing the ERP." Mental availability means the brand comes to mind in those specific moments, not in the abstract. Sharp and colleagues describe category entry points as the mental representations buyers use to find a brand in memory. A brand with strong mental availability has linked itself to the entry points most relevant to its buyers. A brand without it has awareness but no recall when it matters.

The diagnostic is not "do people know who we are?" It's "do people think of us when the need arises?" These are different questions. They produce very different answers.

Physical availability without friction. Physical availability is not distribution. It is the removal of all friction between the triggered need and the completed purchase. Amazon's one-click ordering is not a UX achievement. It's a physical availability strategy: reduce the gap between intent and action to as close to zero as possible.

The failure mode here is invisible. A brand can believe it has strong distribution while losing buyers to competitors who have simply made buying easier. The friction is rarely dramatic. It accumulates in checkout flows, in content access barriers, in procurement processes, in the gap between where buyers look and where the product is findable.

Distinctive assets that generate recognition. A distinctive brand asset is not a brand preference. It is a brand signal: a colour, a sound, a phrase, a visual element that triggers brand recognition without the brand name. McDonald's golden arches. Intel's four-note audio cue. The Cadbury purple.

The critical distinction: distinctive and differentiated are not the same. Differentiation argues that the brand is better. Distinctiveness argues that the brand is recognisable. Ehrenberg-Bass research consistently shows that differentiation as a growth driver is weaker than distinctiveness. Buyers don't primarily choose brands because they've carefully evaluated superiority. They choose brands that come to mind and are easy to act on. Distinctiveness enables recall. Recall enables choice.

Most organisations confuse these. They invest in differentiation messaging at the expense of distinctiveness building. The result is brand communication that generates consideration among buyers already in-market but fails to expand mental availability more broadly.

What this means for sequencing

Growth work that follows this structure looks different from growth work that doesn't.

Before investing in pipeline development, the organisation needs to establish whether mental availability is present in the buyer segments it's targeting. If it isn't, pipeline activity will generate discovery data, not conversion data. That's useful for early-stage market intelligence, but it's not a sales problem to be solved with a better sales methodology.

Before investing in retention infrastructure, the organisation needs to establish whether penetration is at the level where loyalty dynamics become meaningful. Retention programmes applied to a small customer base don't compound. They manage.

Before investing in channel diversification, the organisation needs to establish whether existing channels are performing because of structural advantages (distinctive assets, mental availability, reduced friction) or because of temporary conditions (founder network, a single champion, early adopter enthusiasm) that won't scale.

The test for each is the same: what would happen if the activity stopped? If the answer is "growth would slow immediately," the activity is load-bearing. If the answer is "we'd probably be fine for a while," the activity is downstream of the actual growth mechanism, which hasn't been found yet.

This is not an argument for doing less. It's an argument for doing the upstream work before the downstream work, rather than instead of it.

What the data actually says

Two figures from the Ehrenberg-Bass research are diagnostic tools, not statistics.

The first: brands that stopped advertising saw sales fall 16% after one year and 25% after two years. This is a measure of mental availability decay. Mental structures require maintenance. A brand that stops building presence loses recall gradually, then rapidly. The implication isn't "never stop advertising." It's that mental availability is a stock, not a flow. It accumulates slowly and depletes faster than most organisations expect.

The second: companies that apply Ehrenberg-Bass principles systematically outperform those using conventional methods by 15 to 20%. This is a sequencing advantage, not a creative advantage. The difference isn't that their campaigns are better. It's that they've established the upstream conditions that make campaigns work.

Neither figure is actionable in isolation. Both become actionable when the organisation has diagnosed which upstream conditions are present and which are absent.

Three diagnostic questions

Growth conversations that start with tactics skip the diagnosis. These questions redirect to the layer where the actual problem usually sits.

When a buyer in your target segment develops the relevant need, do they think of you? Not: do they know who you are. Not: would they recognise your name if they heard it. When the trigger fires, are you present in their mental network? If you don't have data on this, you don't know whether your growth problem is upstream or downstream.

What is the friction profile between triggered need and completed purchase? Map it from the buyer's side, not the seller's side. Where does attention drop? Where do buyers pause? Where do they exit? Friction analysis from the seller's perspective produces the wrong answer. The seller knows where to find the product. The buyer doesn't, until they do.

What do buyers recognise before they recognise your brand name? If the answer is nothing, the brand doesn't have distinctive assets yet. It has descriptors. Descriptors require active attention. Distinctive assets work passively, across the full range of buyer states, including the 95% of the time when buyers are not actively considering a purchase.

If none of these questions can be answered with evidence, the growth conversation isn't ready for tactics. It's ready for diagnostics.