B2B marketers love funnels. We love performance dashboards. We love MQLs, SQLs, CACs, CPQs — the alphabet soup that keeps us feeling in control. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: most of what we spend on performance marketing is wasted.
Why? Enter the 95-5 rule.
Out of your total audience, only 5% are in-market right now. The other 95%? They’re simply not ready to buy. Think of it like wandering around a Volvo dealership when you just signed a three-year lease. You’re browsing, not buying.
And yet, most B2B marketers put nearly 100% of their budgets into chasing that 5%. No wonder results plateau.
The Death (and Rebirth) of Brand
In the 1960s, brand dictated the success of companies. Then, with the rise of marketing automation in the 2010s, we discovered we could track everything. Finally, CMOs could prove ROI. Google, Meta, and Amazon gladly pocketed more than half of global ad spend, and branding quietly got shoved aside.
But here’s the catch: performance-only marketing doesn’t build long-term demand. It just exhausts the 5% who are already ready to buy. Branding, on the other hand, creates future demand — it plants your company in the minds of the 95% who aren’t buying today, but will be tomorrow.
Les Binet and Peter Field’s research shows the ideal split: roughly 50/50 between brand and activation. In reality? B2B is far closer to 100% activation.
The Long and the Short of It
We’ve been told branding takes years to pay off. That it’s a slow, hard-to-measure investment. But that’s not the whole story.
Mark Ritson points out that the best brand-building campaigns often generate immediate sales too. Long-term work fuels the short term. But the reverse isn’t true: short-term sales activation rarely builds a brand. That’s why purely performance-driven campaigns eventually flatline.
So, How Do You Build a Brand?
It starts with memory. People don’t think about brands; they think about situations. (“I need energy.” “I’m traveling for work.”) These are Category Entry Points (CEPs) — the mental doors through which your brand can enter. The more CEPs you connect your brand to, the more likely you’ll be remembered when it matters.
Distinctive assets — your logo, colors, tagline, even sounds — are the shortcuts that help people recognize you instantly. Consistency beats constant reinvention.
As Byron Sharp reminds us: brands grow by gaining more buyers, not by deepening loyalty. Reach matters. Fame matters. Emotion matters.
Living With the ROI Question
Let’s be honest: you’ll never prove brand ROI to the satisfaction of your CFO. And that’s okay. Great marketing leaders learn to live with that truth while making the case for investment.
The benchmark? Spend 5–10% of gross revenue on advertising, with a healthy balance between brand and performance. It’s not about choosing one or the other. It’s about making them work together.
The Takeaway
The companies that win tomorrow aren’t the ones who optimize their funnel dashboards to death. They’re the ones who invest in brand today, connect to as many buying situations as possible, and stay memorable long after the click-through rate is forgotten.
Performance gets you short-term sales. Brand gets you long-term growth. You need both — but if your budget is 95% performance? It’s time to rethink.
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