Mental & Physical Availability: The Opportunity for Better Marketing ROI

Editor's note: This post has been authored by Tom Stein, Chairman and Chief Brand Officer at Stein and Kate Newstead, the B2B Institute at LinkedIn.

The B2B Growth Equation 

A cornerstone of consumer brand strategy, Mental Availability (how easily and often a brand comes to mind) is becoming a foundation of B2B marketing strategy. This empirical concept was pioneered by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute more than 10 years ago based on decades of research in the B2C world. Since then, many independent and industry datasets and case studies have validated that B2B brands must also build Mental Availability to overcome the same challenge: getting past the forgetfulness of the human brain to increase the likelihood of a brand surfacing in a purchasing situation. Increasingly, B2B marketing leaders are delving into Mental Availability, thoughtfully and deliberately applying it to their growth strategies and marketing investments. This in turn is prompting more integrated, unified campaigns; bold, emotive and human-centric creative approaches; and a holistic approach to brand and marketing measurement. All the while, it is driving B2B forward, step by step.  

Now, the aligned strategy of Physical Availability (making a brand easy to find & buy) is emerging in B2B. Physical Availability will be unfamiliar to many B2B marketers. Reason being, unlike our B2C counterparts, many B2B marketers have limited influence over where their products are physically available – in other words, the sales channels their products appear in (called presence by The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute), how brands stand out to win in those channels (prominence), and which products are created, prioritized and retired to better serve customer needs and drive opportunity (portfolio). These three domains – presence, prominence and portfolio – are more typically owned by marketers’ cross functional peers, including product, sales, finance, engineering and R&D. But all are core to unlocking growth – a unifying objective across all functions and at the heart of marketers’ remit. An optimized and unified approach to managing Mental and Physical Availability can lead to effectiveness and efficiency gains across the organization, which is covered in our report, “Easy to Find: Being Where B2B Buying Happens”. For marketing specifically, a unified approach illuminates the pathway to improved ROI on Mental Availability investments – most of which are funded from the marketing budget. 

For each element of Physical Availability, we explore below why marketers must integrate them into the earliest stages of marketing strategy and communications planning and how doing so can lead to better decisions and campaign performance gains. 

Portfolio: Investing in Growth 

In today’s resource-constrained environment, marketers are consistently required to ‘do more with less’. So, while it’s tempting and sometimes politically necessary to spread budgets thinly across products and channels (thus covering all bases to appease a complex internal stakeholder map), this often leads to underinvestment in the areas that matter most and lack of return overall. 

Effective portfolio management provides clarity on which sub-brands, products, services and solutions drive the greatest growth and profit. Although B2B marketers are rarely the owners of product portfolio decisions and architecture, understanding (and ideally influencing) these decisions is the essential starting point for marketing investment allocation that optimally delivers against the company’s commercial objective. Marketers must be able to identify between core revenue drivers and growth opportunities—and allocate investments accordingly. 

This often means focusing first on sufficient investment in the brand (to drive Mental Availability, and highest-opportunity product/solution sets (to support Physical Availability). It then means making deliberate, evidence-based bets on other product solution sets to support, budget permitting. The goal is to support the products that will deliver the greatest return. This in turn provides the biggest opportunity for marketing ROI. 

For one Stein client (an enterprise software brand), the agency and marketing team recently completed a highly complex portfolio management and prioritization exercise to enable sales and marketing focus, inform further product development and acquisitions, consolidate solutions (including sunsetting some), and provide an extensible system to analyze and financialize the portfolio over time. The net effect was to eliminate myriad “micro campaigns” and in their place invest in highest potential campaigns, from brand-through demand, in lockstep with the sales organization and partner/reseller ecosystem. 

On this instance, a focused portfolio investment strategy not only is improving campaign performance, it also is strengthening marketing’s role as a strategic growth partner within the organization. 

Presence: Be Where Buying Happens 

Physical Availability (presence) is largely about where people buy. As marketers, we are also interested in who these people are and how do they get there? The B2B buyer journey is often complex. Unlike B2C, there is no ‘B2B shelf’; instead, it’s a maze of many digital and physical touchpoints, buying groups, and a purchase process that can stretch over two years. 

So, effective marketing also involves knowing intimately where your brand and prioritized offerings are—or should be—available to buy. This means mapping the sales channels where you and your competitors are present, and identifying which channels deliver the most—and most profitable—customers. Channel penetration and customer audience analysis further help to understand which (if any) channels deliver access to types of customers for specific offerings. Identifying where you’re over-performing or under-indexing, and understanding the nuances of what it takes to win in each channel (and how resource intensive it may be) is key to focusing resources on sustainable growth. 

For example, if on average 30% of category revenue is attributed to brand-owned websites, but only 15% of your revenue is attributed to your website, this suggests your website is underdelivering on its revenue potential. Understanding what is restricting growth is the next step. Or consider this: a distributor partnership may unlock a new set of customers or geographies your sales team currently can’t access. Presence in this distributor channel may thus provide a growth opportunity that is also resource efficient for your organization.  

Once your priority channels most likely to deliver growth are identified, marketing investments should be aligned accordingly. If sales representatives are the primary route to purchase, sales enablement becomes essential. If mobile apps and websites are a core source of engagement with your products/solutions, investing in an easy to find and navigate digital ecosystem (and media decisions to drive people to it) is a must. 

What’s more, B2B buying is almost never a solo decision. It involves a group of stakeholders, including both direct and hidden buyers, with diverse roles and priorities. Understanding who these buyers are—and where they engage—is critical. For instance, technical decision makers may attend industry trade shows or download white papers from your website or social posts, while legal or finance stakeholders may be more likely to come across your brand and products via paid media or earned PR content. Taken together with sales channel choices, communication and media channel choices become more robust.   

Lexmark, one of the world’s leading manufacturers of imaging products, has maximized the impact of its marketing programs by optimizing channel investments based on a deep understanding of their audiences' purchasing patterns. Mental availability and prospect engagement is achieved through digital display and paid social targeting enterprise accounts with substantial customization by vertical. Additionally, Lexmark has anchored its content strategy in the physical presence of its products by developing interactive value maps that enable engaged audiences to click into diagrams of facilities (e.g. hospitals, retail stores, manufacturing plants, etc.) to see how Lexmark imaging solutions deliver value across each area of a business. These approaches have led to sustained growth in enterprise pipeline contribution from marketing and consistent improvements in marketing spend efficiency. 

Prominence: Stand Out Where It Matters 

Once your products are present on the right channels, the next challenge is visibility. In a crowded marketplace, simply showing up is not enough. Human attention is limited and easily distracted by competitors. The task is to achieve strong brand prominence so that your offerings stand out in sales environments. Sales environments can vary significantly, from trade shows to search queries typed into a web browser or LLM. Consider which tools are most helpful to achieve stand out in these various environments and how they can be integrated throughout both sales channels and the communications channel strategy. 

Brands can achieve prominence by investing in high-impact placements—such as premium ad formats. However, these are temporary ‘rented’ gains unless supported by distinctive brand assets and associations that your brand uniquely owns. Without them, prominence becomes a bidding war where the deepest pockets win. 

Prominence is perhaps where the value of synergies between Mental and Physical Availability are most obvious. Every touchpoint, from a 90-second website visit to a social media ad to a product demo at a trade show should reinforce a consistent and distinctive brand experience. Repetition and distinctiveness are key to building memory structures that influence buying decisions. Consistency has a compounding effect. 

A unified approach to brand expression across the customer journey can deliver significant value. Juniper Networks, for example, aligned brand messaging across F1 sponsorship, WSJ takeovers, CNBC, Reddit and LinkedIn, connecting to solution-specific demand messaging across digital channels, SEM/SEO, third-party and owned events, sales enablement, competitive takeaway campaigns, landing pages and email nurtures. This orchestration contributed to a 40% year-over-year increase in product orders. Visual consistency and use of distinctive brand assets, such as celebrities in Juniper’s case, contributed to stand-out prominence and ability to outperform larger competitors with much higher marketing budgets.  

In long B2B purchase cycles, consistency and distinctiveness are not optional—they are essential for nurturing the journey and reinforcing brand memory over time. Even for the biggest global B2B brands memory building is a job that is never done. 

Conclusion: Physical Availability Is a Marketing Imperative 

Physical Availability is not just a sales or operations concern—it’s a marketing imperative. When B2B marketers take ownership of where and how their brand shows up in the buying journey, they gain the insights needed to build more effective communications strategies. While most marketers are resource constrained and asked to do ‘more with less’, the thoughtful application of Physical and Mental Availability principles can be an untapped opportunity. With the potential to unearth sharper media choices, stronger creative cut-through, and improved ROI. And perhaps most importantly, elevate the strategic and commercial value of marketing across the business.  

Tying It All Together