The 95/5 rule in marketing: a 3-minute breakdown

The 95/5 rule says that at any moment, only about 5% of your potential buyers are ready to buy. The other 95% aren't in the market yet. It applies to both B2B and B2C, and it changes what your marketing should be doing.

Most of your ads land on people who won't buy today. That sounds like waste. It isn't. Those 95% are your future buyers, and the job of marketing is to be the brand they already know and trust by the time they enter the market.

What is the 95/5 rule in marketing?

The 95/5 rule states that roughly 5% of potential customers are actively in-market and ready to buy at any given time, while 95% are not. It comes from Professor John Dawes of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute (2021), who studied B2B buying cycles for the LinkedIn B2B Institute.

The 5% figure is a starting point, not a law. For most products the real split falls somewhere between 98/2 and 93/7. It's a rate you can calculate from how often people in your category actually buy.

This feels wrong at first. You buy shampoo every month but a car every few years, so surely the "in-market" share is wildly different. But longer gaps between purchases come with longer decision windows. You might spend 30 days choosing a car and one afternoon choosing shampoo. The in-market share evens out more than you'd expect.

Why does the 95/5 rule matter?

The 95/5 rule matters because it exposes the ceiling on performance marketing. Performance ads only capture demand that already exists, and that demand is capped at the small share of buyers who are in-market right now.

This is why so many brands hit a growth plateau after early success with performance-led marketing. They harvest all the ready-to-buy demand, then growth stalls, because there's no one left to convert. There's nothing to catch, because the other 95% were never going to click.

The takeaway: marketing success isn't only about converting the 5%. It's about influencing the 95% so they choose you later. That's the work that keeps growth going once performance runs out of road.

What should marketers do about the 95/5 rule?

1. Rebalance budget toward brand building

Shift investment toward brand awareness and high-reach memory-building campaigns rather than focusing only on direct sales activation.

Binet & Field’s 60% brand / 40% activation rule is a rough starting point, but depending on your stage, category, etc., the best balance could range anywhere from 50/50 to 80/20 in favor of brand marketing.

2. Adjust expectations and KPIs

Instead of focusing solely on immediate ROI or quarterly sales lifts, start tracking top-of-the-funnel indicators like brand awareness and mental availability, because they drive future sales.

3. Segment your strategy

Split your thinking by who each ad is really for: the 5% shopping now, or the 95% who aren't.

For the 5% shopping now. Make it easy to buy. Clear product info, findable pricing, promotions, strong sales enablement. Measure it on conversions and engagement. This is where performance marketing earns its keep.

For the 95% not shopping yet. Build memory. The goal is that when they do enter the market, your brand comes to mind first. Three things make a brand-building ad work:

• Strong emotional storytelling – Cut through the noise and grab attention from people who don’t care about your product yet. ‍
• Unmistakable branding – Ensure viewers remember your brand, both visually and audibly. ‍
• Simple message – Make it clear what you’re good for (category) and, optionally, highlight one unique value (how you’re different). No extra messages, no product details. 

Make sure every ad you run actually works.

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How do you measure marketing to the 95%?

You measure it with mental availability, not immediate sales. Mental availability, or brand salience, is how likely your brand is to come to mind in a buying situation, and it's the metric that predicts whether the 95% will pick you when they finally buy.

Here's the trap. Reaching the 95% is the right strategy, but it's the hardest spend to defend, because it doesn't show up in this quarter's sales. So marketers fall back on quarterly ROI, cut the brand budget, and walk straight into the plateau.

The fix is to track the leading indicator instead of waiting for the lagging one. Mental availability moves before sales do. If it's rising, you're building the future demand that performance marketing can later convert. If it's flat while you're spending on reach, your creative isn't building memory and you can fix it now, not after the campaign.

Brand tracking shows whether your reach spend is turning into memory, quarter over quarter, so you can defend the 95% budget with a number that moves.

Origin and academic evidence 

This insight comes from Professor John Dawes of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute (2021), who studied B2B buying patterns. His findings align with previous Ehrenberg-Bass research on brand growth, showing that brands grow by reaching “light buyers”—those who purchase only occasionally. 

Additionally, Les Binet and Peter Field’s research (The Long and the Short of It) found that long-term brand-building campaigns drive larger, more sustainable sales growth over time than short-term activation campaigns.