I’m a fan of the KRON function:
>> a = 1:3;
>> N = 3;
>> b = kron(a,ones(1,N))
b =
1 1 1 2 2 2 3 3 3
You can also look at this related question (which dealt with replicating elements of 2-D matrices) to see some of the other solutions involving matrix indexing. Here’s one such solution (inspired by Edric’s answer):
>> b = a(ceil((1:N*numel(a))/N))
b =
1 1 1 2 2 2 3 3 3