Brand tracking has long given marketers measures such as awareness, consideration and preference. Quantilope is betting that a more specific measure of what consumers remember in buying situations can provide a stronger link between brand health and commercial performance.

The automated research technology company has launched Mental Availability Norms, a benchmarking framework designed to help brands compare their performance against competitors across categories and markets.

Built using nearly 8,000 data points covering thousands of brands in 35 countries, the norms span North America, Europe, APAC and Latin America and six industries: non-food CPG, food and beverages, fashion, durables, retail and services. The methodology is based on research from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science (EBI).

Mental Availability measures how readily a brand comes to mind when consumers enter a buying situation. Instead of asking simply whether someone recognizes a brand, the approach examines the situations or Category Entry Points (CEPs) associated with it.

EBI describes CEPs as the thoughts that occur as category buyers move toward a purchase. They form the building blocks of Mental Availability because they help determine which brands are mentally accessible in particular buying situations.

Quantilope's new benchmark focuses on three metrics: Mental Market Share, Mental Penetration and Network Size. Mental Market Share measures a brand's proportion of category-entry-point associations relative to competitors. Mental Penetration measures the share of category buyers who connect a brand with at least one CEP, while Network Size measures the average number of CEPs associated with a brand.

The practical objective is to give marketers a reference point for determining whether a score represents strong or weak performance within a particular competitive environment.

For example, Quantilope says brands in the bottom 40% for Mental Penetration are struggling to reach non-buyers. A marketer might respond by shifting media investment toward broader-reach campaigns rather than concentrating spending primarily on frequency.

That recommendation reflects the underlying EBI philosophy: building Mental Availability requires brands to be connected with a broad range of relevant buying situations and to remain easy to retrieve from memory. EBI also emphasizes broad-reach media and distinctive brand assets as part of that growth strategy.

The new norms could therefore change how brand-health tracking is used. Rather than treating a tracking score as an isolated KPI, marketing teams can compare it with category norms, establish realistic targets and connect changes in Mental Availability to commercial outcomes.

Quantilope says its own 2024 analysis of more than 100 brands found a correlation of r = 0.83 between Mental Market Share and sales data, with an R² of 0.69. In statistical terms, the company's analysis found that the survey metric explained roughly 69% of the variation in sales data. That is a quantilope analysis rather than an independent industry meta-analysis, so the finding should be interpreted accordingly.

The benchmark also produces some intriguing geographic differences. Quantilope reports that North American and European markets tend to have lower and more evenly distributed Mental Market Share scores, while APAC and LATAM can show substantially higher scores, which the company attributes partly to category maturity and first-mover advantages.

Another finding is that the strongest 20% of brands can encounter what Quantilope calls a "growth ceiling." At that point, simply taking mental share from established competitors may become less productive than expanding the number of category buyers or purchase situations associated with the category.

The significance extends beyond consumer packaged goods. Quantilope says clients in services, durables, retail and some B2B categories are applying Mental Availability and CEP analysis, consistent with EBI's broader work on how B2B brands grow through mental and physical availability.

For enterprise marketing teams, that makes the launch less about another brand-awareness dashboard and more about standardizing how brand memory is measured across markets. The real test will be whether these norms improve marketing planning and investment decisions rather than simply adding another benchmark to already crowded marketing analytics stacks.

Market Landscape

Mental Availability sits between traditional brand awareness research and broader marketing effectiveness measurement. Quantilope already offers automated tracking around Mental Market Share, Mental Penetration and Network Size, while the new norms add external category and market context.

That distinction matters. A brand can know whether its Mental Market Share is rising without necessarily knowing whether the result is strong relative to competitors. Normative benchmarks provide the missing reference point.

The approach also differs from conventional brand-health studies that emphasize awareness, consideration or purchase intent. Mental Availability asks a more behaviorally specific question: when a buying situation occurs, which brands can consumers retrieve from memory?

EBI has developed Category Entry Point research as a way of identifying those buying situations and assessing a brand against competitors.

Strategic Outlook

The launch reflects a broader movement toward evidence-based marketing measurement. As CMOs face greater pressure to justify media and brand-building investments, metrics that can connect consumer psychology with business outcomes become more valuable.

For MarTech and marketing analytics teams, the opportunity is to incorporate Mental Availability into a wider measurement architecture rather than treat it as a replacement for sales, attribution or customer data.

That could make the benchmark particularly useful for multinational organizations. Comparing the same brand across regions can reveal whether weak performance reflects execution problems, category maturity or fundamentally different competitive dynamics.

Top Insights

• Quantilope's Mental Availability Norms give marketers external benchmarks for judging brand salience rather than relying solely on year-over-year tracking changes.
• Nearly 8,000 data points across 35 countries create a broader reference framework for comparing brand performance across regions, industries and competitors.
• Mental Penetration focuses attention on non-buyers, potentially helping media teams identify when broader reach should take priority over frequency.
• Quantilope's reported 69% sales-variance finding strengthens the case for Mental Market Share, although the analysis remains company-generated rather than independently validated.
• Extending Mental Availability into services, retail and B2B could make Category Entry Point analysis relevant well beyond traditional CPG brand marketing.

Get in touch with our MarTech Experts.