Ehrenberg-Bass research that has rewired how serious marketers think about budget allocation. CFOs especially should keep reading.
There is a piece of research from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, working with the LinkedIn B2B Institute, that has spent the past few years quietly making the rounds at marketing conferences. Most senior B2B leaders have heard of it. Most have not yet allowed it to change anything about how they actually allocate spend. The research, published by Professor John Dawes in 2021 and reinforced by every subsequent dataset that has tested it, says something genuinely uncomfortable: at any given moment, only about five percent of B2B buyers in your category are in the market for what you sell. Ninety-five percent are not. They will be at some point. They are not now.
Most B2B digital marketing budgets are spent talking to the five percent. Lead generation campaigns, conversion-optimised landing pages, retargeting funnels, demand generation funnels with various creative names. All of it is aimed at people who are ready to buy this quarter. The five percent. Which is fine, except that this is the most competitive and expensive segment to win, and the buyers in it are already comparing you against everyone else they have remembered. The CMO who can quietly bend the budget toward the ninety-five percent, while still feeding the five percent enough to satisfy quarterly pipeline targets, is the CMO who is winning a long game most of their peers have not noticed exists.
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The Ehrenberg-Bass research is grounded in two well-established findings from marketing science. The first is that B2B buying cycles are long. Most categories see buyers in the market only every few years, sometimes every five or seven. The second is that, when buyers do enter the market, they have a small mental shortlist of suppliers they already remember. Suppliers who are not on that mental list are not seriously considered, no matter how good their lead generation campaign happens to be that quarter.
The implication is that most B2B digital marketing should be spent building memory in the ninety-five percent who are not yet buying, so that when they enter the five percent, you are already on the shortlist. This is not a new idea. Brand-builders have argued it for decades. What the Ehrenberg-Bass work has added is a quantified, peer-reviewed evidence base that makes the argument hard to dismiss as creative-team special pleading.
There is a familiar scene, in B2B companies under quarterly pressure, where the CFO asks marketing to defend its brand spend. Marketing answers in language about awareness, brand equity, and other metrics that sound, to a finance ear, suspiciously like things that cannot be counted. The CFO cuts the brand budget. The pipeline holds up for two or three quarters. Then, eighteen to thirty months later, the company finds itself losing deals it would once have won, and nobody is sure why.
The Ehrenberg-Bass framework makes the connection visible. Brand spend is not awareness for its own sake. It is the systematic accumulation of mental availability among the ninety-five percent of your future buyers. When you cut it, the bill arrives later, and it arrives in the form of harder-won deals, longer sales cycles, and weaker pricing power. The famous IPA research by Les Binet and Peter Field, conducted over decades, suggests the optimal split for B2B is roughly forty-six percent of spend on brand-building and fifty-four percent on activation. Most B2B digital marketing programmes are running closer to ten-ninety the wrong way.
The rule is intellectually simple. Operationalising it inside a real budget is harder, partly because it requires holding two timeframes in your head at once, and partly because the quarterly pipeline pressure that drives most B2B marketing teams is not patient with two-year horizons. Three practical moves consistently work in our client engagements, regardless of sector.
A defensible monthly board report on B2B digital marketing under the 95-5 framework reports on two streams in parallel. The activation stream reports pipeline contribution, sales cycle length, and conversion rates against benchmarks. The brand stream reports share of search, prompted and unprompted recall in target accounts, and share of voice in earned and owned channels. Each stream has its own targets, its own time horizon, and its own diagnostics.
The benefit, beyond the marketing-science argument, is that the reporting itself reframes the budget conversation with finance. Brand spend is no longer a hopeful gesture toward awareness. It is a measurable input to a measurable outcome on a defined time horizon, exactly the kind of structure CFOs are trained to evaluate. The conversation moves from “why do we spend on brand” to “is our brand spend tracking against its leading indicators.” That second conversation is much easier to win.
If you are a CMO, the practical step is to audit your current B2B digital marketing spend split. Add up everything aimed at converting the five percent who are in market right now. Add up everything aimed at building memory in the ninety-five percent who are not. If the second number is less than fifteen percent of the first, you are running an activation-heavy programme that is quietly mortgaging your pipeline two years out, and the rebalance can begin without dramatic disruption.
If you are a CFO, the practical step is to ask for the leading indicator metrics on brand spend. Share of search, prompted recall in target accounts, share of voice. If they do not exist, the issue is reporting design, not brand value. And if you are a CEO, the practical step is to look at your last four quarters of new logo wins and ask, honestly, how many of those buyers had heard of you before they entered the market. The answer is usually most of them, which is the 95-5 rule paying out in real money.
Want to rebalance your B2B digital marketing budget against the research, not against last year’s quarterly pressure?
VIMI’s B2B digital marketing practice builds budget allocation models grounded in Ehrenberg-Bass and IPA research, with leading-indicator reporting your CFO can audit. Within four weeks you will have a defensible split, a measurement framework, and a quarterly cadence.
Schedule a consultation with VIMI’s B2B digital marketing team at vimi.co. The first conversation is short, free, and structured around your actual numbers.
