'Invest in the 95% Who Aren't Ready to Buy.' That Sentence is the Entire Case for Brand in B2B.

Every B2B marketing budget answers a single question that most teams never ask out loud. Are we investing in the buyers who are ready right now, or in the ones who will be ready next quarter, next year, or in three years?

Ilaria Pasquinelli, CMO at LIONS, the company behind the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, gave the clearest answer I've heard. In a recent CMI interview about priorities for 2026, she said: "We need to invest in the 95% of customers who aren't ready to buy." That sentence is the entire case for brand in B2B. Everything I've written in The State of Brand, every argument about owned media, trust, the shortlist, and why brand is pipeline, collapses into those 17 words.

The reason it matters right now is that every force in the system is pushing against it. Tariffs are squeezing budgets, CFOs are demanding shorter payback periods, and the major platforms are automating toward bottom-of-funnel conversion. Every pressure pushes B2B marketers toward the 5% who are ready to buy right now and away from the 95% who will be ready later. The companies that resist that pressure will win. The ones that give in will wonder, three years from now, why their pipeline dried up.

The Purchase Cycle Nobody Plans For

The 95-5 rule comes from John Dawes at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, popularized through the LinkedIn B2B Institute's research partnership, and the math is straightforward. Companies change service providers roughly once every five years on average. That means only about 20% of business buyers are in market over the course of an entire year, and in any given quarter, approximately 5%. The other 95% are out of market. They already have what you sell, they're under contract with a competitor, or they haven't yet identified the problem you solve.

The budget implications are hard to overstate. If 95% of potential buyers aren't ready to buy, then 95% of the advertising impact will be delayed. Demand gen campaigns targeting in-market buyers can only reach 5% of the addressable market at best. The rest of the spend is either wasted if it doesn't build any memory, or invested if it builds the awareness that influences the eventual buying decision.

Here's the finding I keep coming back to. In a LinkedIn study, 96% of B2B marketers expected to see the main effect of their ad campaigns within two weeks. Two weeks, for a product with a five-year purchase cycle. That gap between expectation and reality is where most brand budgets go to die.

The Shortlist Is Set Before the First Call

The deeper question the 95-5 rule answers is what happens in the buyer's mind at the moment they enter the market. Ehrenberg-Bass research showed that when a buyer moves into active purchasing mode, they think of one to three brands immediately. The BBN "Rule of Three" study across 850 B2B case studies confirmed the same pattern. Forrester's data reinforced it from a different angle: 41% of B2B buyers entered the market with a single vendor already in mind, and 92% had a shortlist before engaging with any sales team. By the time your SDR gets the inbound lead, the buyer has already decided who to talk to based on who they remembered.

That's what investing in the 95% actually does. It builds the familiarity and mental availability that ensures that when an out-of-market buyer becomes an in-market buyer, your company is the one that comes to mind. Not because you ran a targeted ad that week or your ABM platform detected an intent signal, but because you spent the previous months and years earning a place in their memory.

The Split Almost Nobody Funds

Binet and Field's work on marketing effectiveness is as close to settled science as B2B has. Their study for the LinkedIn B2B Institute found that B2B companies should target a 50/50 split between brand and activation, a slight adjustment from the 60/40 ratio they established for B2C but built on the same principle. Half the budget should reach people who aren't ready to buy yet.

Almost no B2B company actually allocates this way. The typical budget is overwhelmingly weighted toward demand generation, lead capture, and bottom-of-funnel activation. Brand gets whatever is left over, which usually means it gets cut first when margins tighten.

The cost of that imbalance is well documented. IPA data showed that fame-generating brand strategies proved 12 times more effective than rational product claims in B2B. WARC found that brands with high awareness achieved conversion rates 2.5 times higher than unknown competitors, and strong brands reduced customer acquisition costs by 30 to 50%. The part of this that I think gets lost in the budget conversation is that brand spending isn't competing with demand gen. It's making demand gen cheaper. Every dollar invested in awareness reduces the cost of every conversion campaign that follows it.

Brand Created the Sale, Demand Gen Captured It

StarTech.com, a B2B technology accessories company that sells connectivity and infrastructure products almost entirely through channel partners like Amazon, CDW, and other resellers, ran a test worth paying attention to. The company added brand-focused spend on top of its existing bottom-of-funnel demand campaigns on Amazon and tracked what happened downstream. Share of voice with channel partners increased. Resellers reported more customer inquiries. Those resellers directed prospects to Amazon links for purchase.

The brand spend made the entire channel more productive. Partners sold more because buyers were asking for StarTech.com by name, and that only happened because the investment reached those buyers while they were still out of market. When they moved in, they already knew who to ask for. The demand gen captured the conversion. The brand investment created the opportunity. That's the dynamic most B2B budgets are structured to miss entirely.

The Market Is Telling You to Do the Wrong Thing

Every major force in B2B right now is pushing budgets toward in-market buyers and away from everyone else. Tariffs are squeezing margins, and when margins shrink, the first cut is always the spending that can't be attributed to immediate revenue. CFOs are demanding shorter payback periods, which translates directly into more demand gen, more paid search, more performance campaigns, and less brand. Meta and Google are automating toward conversion, optimizing for immediate action rather than building memory. AI search is collapsing the discovery journey into a single answer, and if you haven't built recognition through years of consistent investment, you don't exist in that answer. The measurement systems make this worse. The spending that makes you visible to AI shows no ROI in any dashboard, which makes it the easiest line item to cut and the most expensive one to lose.

The companies that follow these signals are making a rational short-term decision and a catastrophic long-term one. The buyers who aren't ready today are tomorrow's revenue, and every quarter spent optimizing exclusively for the ones already in market is a quarter of compounding awareness you don't get back.

The Bet That Pays on a Longer Timeline

The evidence keeps showing up in unexpected places. An AI company that never ran a single ad overtaking the market leader. Media properties being acquired at premiums that make no sense unless you understand what a trusted audience is actually worth. AI search engines cite the brands that invested in authority years before the technology existed to reward it. None of these stories set out to prove the case for brand. They just keep proving it anyway.

The 95-5 rule gives that thesis its empirical foundation. The vast majority of future buyers are out of market right now, and the only way to influence their eventual decision is to build awareness before they need you. Pasquinelli wasn't making a theoretical argument. She was describing the only strategy that actually compounds in B2B. The research supports it, the data is clear, and the proof points keep accumulating. The only question is whether you have the conviction to fund it when every short-term pressure in the market is telling you not to.