Mental availability is the standing recognition a brand holds in a buyer's mental map of a category, built over time so that when an account finally enters the market it already knows and trusts you, rather than meeting you as a stranger it has to discover.
Mental availability is the strategy; the Demand Compass is the instrument. The 95-5 rule says most of your market is not buying at any moment, so the work is to be in the account's mental map of the category on the day it is. On the Compass that is the brand awareness axis: do they know us, engage with our content, our point of view. You build it slowly, with everything you publish and every room you are in, and you cannot rush it.
The case for it is not soft. 6sense studied thousands of real B2B purchases and found that by the time a buyer first engages a vendor, they have already completed roughly 70 percent of their journey, most of it anonymous, and the vendor ranked first at that moment goes on to win about 80 percent of the time. The race is largely run before anyone raises a hand, and it is won by whoever built awareness while no one was watching. Les Binet and Peter Field, across nearly a thousand effectiveness cases, landed on roughly 60 percent of budget for long-term brand building and 40 percent for short-term activation, with their later B2B work moving that split closer to even.
What the Compass adds is measurement at the account level. Consumer brands survey a panel; a B2B market of five hundred or two thousand accounts is small enough to instrument directly. Branded search volume and impressions are aggregated and anonymous, so they cannot be tied to pipeline or defended to a board. Resolve the behavioral footprint, branded searches, unprompted mentions, repeat visits, engagement with your founders' posts, to named accounts inside your ICP, and mental availability stops being a belief and becomes a number that runs ahead of pipeline.
From The Demand Compass, by David Moreira and Marcos Stubrin. All terms · The book
