Growth: Obey the forces you wish to command!
Companies obsess over the wrong levers. They pour millions into loyalty programs, Influencer, Social commerce or A/B test landing pages endlessly, and chase the latest marketing channels—all while missing the fundamental laws that actually drive sustainable growth.
This misdirected focus isn't just inefficient; it's counterproductive. Research from the Ehrenberg Bass Institute, spanning thousands of brands across decades, reveals a striking pattern: businesses that succeed long-term aren't the ones perfecting tactics or deepening customer relationships. They're the ones that understand and systematically apply the basic laws of how markets actually work.
These laws operate through four key drivers that directly impact acquisition costs, conversion rates, and revenue predictability:
Mental Availability: Your brand comes to mind when people need your category (When someone thinks 'ride-sharing,' do they think Uber first?)
Physical Availability: People can easily find and buy your product (Amazon's one-click ordering vs. a checkout process requiring account creation)
Category Entry Points: The specific moments, needs, or contexts that trigger purchases (Netflix targeting 'bored on Sunday evening' vs. generic 'entertainment')
Distinctive Brand Assets: The colors, sounds, or shapes that make you instantly recognizable (McDonald's golden arches, Intel's sound signature)"
These aren't marketing theories or trendy frameworks. They're scientific principles that govern how brands grow. Companies that master these fundamentals grow 15-20% faster than those using traditional methods—not because they have better tactics, but because they're working with market forces instead of against them.
The difference between sustainable growth and endless optimization lies in understanding these laws first, then applying them systematically. Everything else is just rearranging deck chairs.
Why Growth Efforts Can Fail
Companies ignore these fundamentals because they fall into four interconnected traps that reinforce each other:
Rely on Outdated Data Most growth decisions come from lagging data - CRM systems and financial reports that show what happened, not what's happening or what will happen next. Traditional datasets miss >50% of the signals that predict future demand, creating a foundation of flawed insights.
Focus on Loyalty Over Reach With incomplete data, companies naturally gravitate toward what they can measure: existing customers. They pour resources into keeping current customers happy while neglecting the broader market that drives actual growth. Byron Sharp's research across thousands of brands shows that loyalty is a result of scale, not a driver of growth. The Double Jeopardy Law proves smaller brands suffer both fewer customers and lower loyalty from those customers.
Think in Silos This misguided focus fragments execution. Marketing, sales, and product teams operate separately, missing how customers and data flow across touchpoints. Without integrated customer data across all channels, each team optimizes for local metrics while missing the bigger growth picture.
Use Surface-Level Metrics The result is measurement that reinforces the wrong behaviors. Growth teams get lost in experimentation details, confusing channel tactics (improving ad performance) with strategy (building mental availability). They track channel performance and return on ad spend but miss the deeper patterns that predict sustainable growth. Meanwhile, advertising has both short-term and long-term effects on demand and price sensitivity - brands that stopped advertising saw sales fall 16% after one year and 25% after two years.
This creates a vicious cycle where poor data leads to wrong priorities, siloed execution, and surface-level measurement that validates the original flawed approach.
What Good Measurement Looks Like: Mercury's Forecasting Model
Mercury, the Y Combinator-backed business banking platform valued at $1.6 billion, shows how to operationalize growth science. Instead of relying on traditional financial reporting that tells you what happened last quarter, CFO Dan Kang built a predictive model that connects brand performance directly to financial outcomes.
His framework tracks five interconnected metrics that translate the four growth drivers into actionable business intelligence:
New customer flow - directly measures how well mental and physical availability convert prospects into customers
Retention cohorts - reveals whether your category entry points and distinctive assets create lasting value beyond the first purchase
Average revenue per customer - shows how effectively your brand assets command pricing power and expand wallet share
Expense levers - tracks the efficiency of brand investments in building availability and recognition
Cash runway - ensures growth investments remain financially sustainable
The breakthrough isn't the individual metrics - it's how they connect. Mercury can predict customer acquisition patterns three months in advance, allowing them to allocate marketing budgets with precision their competitors can't match. While traditional SaaS companies react to monthly cohort reports, Mercury proactively adjusts spend based on leading indicators of demand.
The insight driving this approach: financial performance flows from brand performance, not the other way around. By measuring brand health first, Mercury turns forecasting from guesswork into competitive advantage.
Novel Methods to Execute Growth Better
Traditional growth methods miss critical signals that predict market shifts months before they appear in standard analytics. Companies that consistently outperform competitors use four advanced approaches to bridge the gap between understanding growth laws and executing them effectively:
1. Predictive Market Intelligence
Search and social data reveal demand patterns that traditional market sizing methods miss entirely. Customer intent signals predict market opportunities 6 months before they appear in CRM systems or financial reports, allowing companies to size markets from the bottom up using actual search behavior rather than top-down industry estimates.
Consider Peloton's missed signals in 2021. While the company relied on traditional sales data and market research, search patterns told a different story. Data shows search volume for "home gym equipment" peaked during COVID but began declining months before Peloton's production halt. More telling: Peloton's share of search dropped from 27.3% to 19.33% between June 2024 and April 2025: a 73% decline in search volume that preceded their widely reported sales challenges. Companies monitoring these signals could have adjusted inventory and marketing spend months ahead of the downturn.
2. Dynamic Competitive Analysis Using Wardley Mapping
Traditional competitive analysis captures a snapshot of current market positions. Wardley Mapping reveals how entire competitive landscapes evolve over time by visually representing the evolution of value chains and identifying where companies' activities sit within the broader ecosystem.
Unlike Porter's Five Forces, which assumes static competitive positions, Wardley Maps show how customer needs, technological capabilities, and market dynamics shift simultaneously. This reveals competitive vulnerabilities that traditional analysis misses - like when established players focus on perfecting mature technologies while startups exploit emerging customer needs with simpler solutions. The method helps identify where investments in differentiation, operational efficiency, or new capabilities will generate the greatest sustained competitive advantage as markets evolve.Customer Understanding That Goes Deeper
3. Behavioral Customer Discovery
Most organizations rely on focus groups and surveys that capture what people say rather than what they actually do. Search queries, social conversations, customer service transcripts, and recommendation system logs record unprompted behavior at scale; revealing the benefits customers actually pursue, the friction they experience, and the language they use to describe both.
When analyzed with modern natural language processing techniques, these text streams surface genuine customer priorities versus stated preferences. This approach monitors product and service performance continuously rather than through periodic surveys, creating real-time feedback loops that inform everything from product development to messaging optimization. The insight quality dramatically improves because it's based on observed behavior rather than hypothetical responses.
4. Integrated Data Systems That Actually Work
Most firms track dozens of metrics yet struggle to answer basic questions like "Who is this customer and what do they really want?" The core problem is data fragmentation. Zero-party data (what customers willingly declare) lives in preference centers and survey tools, while behavioral data (observed actions) sits in product analytics, CRM systems, or data warehouses.
When these streams remain separate, insight quality drops, personalization falters, and growth stalls. Linking them within integrated platforms - whether HubSpot, Segment, or custom data environments - produces richer customer profiles, sharper segmentation, and faster evidence-based decisions. Companies can then track how stated preferences align with actual behavior, identify gaps between intention and action, and optimize experiences based on complete customer pictures rather than fragmented data points.
For companies in highly regulated industries or niche markets where sample sizes are small, synthetic data tools like Evidenza create statistically valid, privacy-safe customer records that mimic real behavior patterns. This enables pricing tests, demand forecasting, and machine learning model training without breaching confidentiality rules or GDPR requirements, while removing bias from repeatedly surveying the same limited respondent pools.
Why This Matters Right Now
The companies that understand these principles are already pulling ahead. Mars revenue grew from US$25 billion to US$35 billion after applying Ehrenberg Bass Institute principles, with their 80-year-old Snickers brand experiencing sustained double-digit growth and a 30% lift in advertising effectiveness .This wasn't incremental improvement: it was a fundamental shift in how they approached growth.
The gap between leaders and laggards is widening rapidly. While most companies still optimize for customer retention and channel performance, growth leaders are building systematic advantages through the four drivers: mental availability, physical availability, category entry points, and distinctive brand assets. They're using predictive market intelligence, dynamic competitive analysis, behavioral customer discovery, and integrated data systems to execute these principles at scale.
The evidence is mounting across industries. Companies that master these fundamentals consistently outperform traditional approaches because they're working with the actual laws of market behavior rather than against them. Meanwhile, businesses clinging to outdated loyalty-first strategies find themselves reacting to market changes instead of anticipating them.
The competitive advantage comes from timing. Early adopters gain compounding benefits as their mental and physical availability builds over time, creating barriers that become increasingly difficult for competitors to overcome. The companies implementing these methods now will have months or years of accumulated brand-building momentum before their competitors recognize the shift.
Your Strategic Choice
The science is clear. The methods are proven. The tools are available. The question isn't whether these principles work - it's whether you'll implement them before your competitors do.
Every month you spend optimizing channels, tactics or loyalty programs while competitors build mental availability, you're falling further behind in a race you may not even realize you're running. The companies that win won't be the ones with the most loyal customers - they'll be the ones that systematically reach the most new customers while their competitors chase retention metrics.
The fundamentals of growth haven't changed. But the companies willing to follow them have never had better tools to execute them. Your move.
References | go further
Why Mental Availability is More Powerful Than Awareness : link
Mental availability correlates with strong business results : link
How Mental And Physical Availability Drives Brand Growth: link
Modern marketing dilemmas: What role does brand play in the consumer decision journey? link
Mercury Forecast Model | Google Templates: link
