quantilope Launches Mental Availability Norms to Benchmark Performance as Part of its Market Leading Tracking Solution

Top 20% of brands hit around 12-14%, depending on category, for Mental Market Share in North America and EMEA with top performers managing to achieve up to 30-50%.

NEW YORK, Oct. 6, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- quantilope, a leading provider of automated research technology, is launching the world's first Mental Availability Norms, enabling brands to accurately benchmark their performance against a pool of category and market competitors.

Mental Availability explains how easily a brand comes to mind when consumers are in a buying situation. The new Norms will cover four major regions: North America, Europe, APAC, and LATAM regions and six key industries CPG (non-food), Food & Beverages, Fashion, Durables, Retail and Services.

The Norms will cover three key Mental Availability metrics including Mental Market Share – the percentage of Category Entry Point (CEPs) associations for your brand, compared to all other brands – Mental Penetration, the percentage of category buyers who can link a brand to at least one CEP, indicating growth potential among non-buyers, and Network Size – the average number of CEPs a brand is linked to.

The new Norms allow marketers to benchmark their category position and translate insights into clear action. They are built on close to 8,000 data points from thousands of brands across 35 countries, using the proven methodology of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science (EBI).

For example, any brand with a Mental Penetration in the bottom 40% of category brands is struggling to reach non-buyers. Marketers could respond by adapting their media plan to shift budget toward broader-reach campaigns that prioritize reach over frequency which will help build Mental Availability and set the brand up for growth.

"We know from scientific, peer-reviewed research as well as our own experience in applied market research that Mental Availability and actual business outcomes are strongly correlated. These Norms provide critical context for marketers helping them understand 'what good looks like' for their broader category and how to set realistic targets for these new metrics. Mental Availability Norms help brands effectively link their tracking metrics to marketing planning and goal-setting and drive actual growth and business success," said Madita Brandhorst, Associate Director of Tracking Solutions at quantilope.

quantilope recommends a layered approach to goal-setting based on Mental Availability metrics: first a correlation analysis should be run to establish the connection of Mental Availability and business outcomes, then quintile-based norms should be layered on top to set realistic goals taking the brand's size into account.

Although specific Norms are exclusive to quantilope clients, key findings from the work include:

• Mature markets are more competitive: Markets in North America and Europe display lower, more evenly distributed Mental Market Share quintiles, suggesting a higher level of mental competition among consumers.
  
  
• First-mover advantage is important in emerging markets: Mental Market Share in APAC and LATAM can reach levels 3x higher than those observed in North America and Europe due to category maturity and first-mover advantages. In emerging markets, early entrants often capture substantial share.
  
  
• Brand performance can hit a growth ceiling: Brands within the top 20% mental availability tier face a "growth ceiling" and need to focus on expanding the category as a whole. Conversely, newer entrants can effectively compete by "chipping away" at established market leaders.
  
  
• Mental availability metrics are surprisingly consistent: Although initial expectations suggested significant industry-based differences, the data indicates that core metrics remain largely consistent. For example, the top 20% of brands consistently achieve a mental penetration score of more than 70% regardless of industry.

Since the launch of How Brands Grow by EBI Director Professor Byron Sharp, brands have been increasingly interested in the power of Mental Availability and the EBI's standardized methodology allows quantilope to rigorously compare performance across markets and brands.

The company has been offering automated trackers on these metrics since 2023, with a ten-fold growth in new tracker setups between 2023 and 2024, followed by another doubling of that number in the subsequent two years. The success reflects a broader move away from "black box" metrics toward transparent, standardized brand health indicators that are connected to real-world business success.

A recent meta-analysis conducted by quantilope across more than 100 brands demonstrated a strong correlation between survey-based Mental Availability metrics and brand sales, explaining 69% of variance in sales. This confirms the EBI's assumption that Mental Market Share and Mental Penetration are significantly linked to sales performance and penetration.

"Marketers in some sectors had doubts that this approach could work for a non-CPG category but our Norms demonstrate that the power of Mental Availability extends far beyond the things we buy every week. We now have clients in Services, Durables, Retail and even some in B2B categories successfully applying this approach to identify the Category Entry Points that will help them grow," said Madita Brandhorst. 

For more information please contact Johanna Azis at [email protected] 

About quantilope

quantilope is a technology company obsessed with helping customers grow their brand. Our end-to-end, AI-driven Consumer Intelligence Platform transforms the research process, equipping marketers and insights professionals with 15 fully automated advanced methodologies and real-time tracking. By turning complex data into clear, actionable recommendations, we empower over 1000 global brands - including Pepsi, Kenvue, and Nestlé - to make confident decisions at the speed of the market. Recognized as Greenbook's #1 Market Research Technology for two consecutive years, quantilope is the definitive solution for high-impact strategy, innovation, and performance monitoring.

SOURCE quantilope