It’s Not Time… Yet: Understanding the 95/5 Rule
When the vast majority of your customers exist in the future, the marketer’s job is to become known to them now
Most of your customers exist in the future. That’s the major takeaway from a position paper by Australian Jonathan Dawes, published by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. Specifically, his paper calls out that only about 5% of B2B customers are ready to buy at any given time. That means that on the flip side, 95% of B2B customers are not buying today. And it isn’t just true for B2B. The principle is also directionally sound for B2C, although the ratios themselves vary widely. You can figure out the precise percentage of your specific customer base by understanding their purchasing patterns and frequency. Regardless of the precise numbers, what’s really important here is that, whether it’s 95/5, 85/15 or even 60/40, the majority of your customers exist in the future. They are not ready to buy anything right now.
In the 95/5 example, that truly means customers are only going to buy something from you about 5% of the time. Let’s think of that in terms of one year, 365 days. Out of an entire year, people are only ready to make a bigger purchase for a window of about 18.25 days. That’s less than 3 weeks out of an entire year. In one month, it’s about 1.5 days.
To put that another way, only 5% of your total addressable market is actively in-market at any given time. The remaining 95% are not buyers right now. But they are your future customers.
As Dawes writes, “The core lesson from this remains the same, whether 95% of your buyers are out of market or all of your potential customers are in-market during the period of activity: unless people are buying your product daily, most of your customers exist in the future and the job of the marketer is to become known to them.”
When you accept the elegant truth of this simple observation, everything changes. The marketer’s job is not to sell more bananas. It isn’t to get more accounts opened this June versus last June. It’s to become known now to your future customers.
The implication is this: Marketing cannot exclusively target those ready to buy now. Rather, it must offer valuable, empathetic education and information that encourages long-term growth. With this lens, you can readily see how content becomes more like a product in and of itself. Instead of classifying it as mere “support material,” educational content becomes the product experience before the product. High-value content:
Aligns with customers’ pain points
Gives customers empathetic language to understand their own challenges
Builds trust and brand authority so your company and your product are top of mind when it is time for customers to buy
Shapes market perception, so you get quoted and referenced by the industry
Accelerates sales when customers finally do enter the buying window
Growing Mental Availability
All of this adds up to something you can think of as mental availability, which increasingly is the focus over immediate ROI. If only 5% are ready to buy, your marketing must work hardest on nurturing the 95%—building future demand, brand recognition and trust. For most marketers, this represents a complete mindset shift. It feels much more natural to funnel dollars and manpower toward sales wins right now, particularly with the relentless emphasis on delivering against each quarter and meeting Wall Street’s expectations.
“It takes time, patience, funds and importantly, skill in making good media investments,” explains Dawes. “But those businesses who can build mental availability in the minds of their potential buyers enjoy an enduring advantage, because competitors will find it very difficult to catch up.”
In this world, educational content complemented by broad-awareness marketing become the bridge between interest and intent. Although it may not result in an increase in sales right away, steady publishing and marketing is the way you stay relevant, build authority, and become the default choice when someone finally does enter the buying window.
Every touch builds an authentic relationship that increases conversion rate and average deal size later. These aren’t impressions; they’re investments in buying behavior 6–12 months out (or shorter or longer depending on the particular product or service).
Follow Warren Buffet’s Example
The concept of mental availability is why Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway spends a boatload of money on advertising. For instance, Buffet increased Geico’s $20 million yearly ad spend to $838 million by 2023. And that’s a pittance in comparison to WalMart’s spend of $4.1 billion that same year. Apple is projected to spend $7.42 billion in the US in 2025, up from $775 million in 2023. In 2026, their investment is forecasted to top $8 billion. Samsung spent $9 billion on advertising back in 2022.
Why do these massive companies spend so much on advertising when they already have almost universal name recognition as well as unbelievable customer loyalty? To stay top of mind, you have to continually invest in your brand. Truly powerful, iconic brands trigger a memory when people are ready to buy. While it is an intangible, a brand can create an emotional connection with customers.
Warren Buffet describes first deeply understanding that ineffable pull when he bought See’s Candy. “If we had not owned See’s, I would not be surprised if we would have never owned Coca-Cola,” he said.
Building and believing in a brand in some ways is an act of trust. While there are growing innovative ways to measure brand awareness and sentiment toward brands, it cannot easily be tied to immediate sales metrics. Thus, many leaders cut advertising first when budgets get tight. Buffet, for one, does the opposite. Why? When competitors cut advertising, that vacuum creates opportunities for those who keep spending. It’s a long-tail payoff, though, with an emotional connection to a brand building over years and in some cases even decades.
The bottom line is, you can’t see marketing as a cost. Rather, it has to be welcomed as an investment in owning mental availability, which is a crucial mindset shift that has to be made when you internalize the fact that most of your customers exist in the future and are not ready to buy yet.
Warren Buffet’s partner Charlie Munger observed that businesses with intense customer loyalty create unusual economic advantages.
When people are looking for a solution, they typically lean towards brands that already take up space in their minds. People don't consider all options — they go with what feels familiar. Brands that stay top-of-mind long before people are ready to buy gain an edge that’s hard for competitors to dislodge.
Great Stories Are Made for Multiple Tellings
“Branding often involves retelling the same fictional story again and again, until people become convinced it is the truth,” writes historian-philosopher-futurist Yuval Noah Harari in his book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century.
Expertly crafted stories have tremendous sticking power. But to truly take hold, they have to be told, shared, retold, loved and worn by time like a favorite soft t-shirt or the Velveteen Rabbit. So everyone can tell them by heart. Today, we are inundated by new movies, series, books and videos every single day. But there are some quintessential stories you return to again and again. I’ve reread Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice many times, and I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve watched Moonstruck. It’s also worth noting that the world’s oldest story, The Epic of Gilgamesh, has survived for hundreds of years because it was first told and retold in the bard tradition, then finally committed to stone tablets.
From the inside looking out, it can be easy to fall into the trap of feeling that this exercise is repetitive and boring. But consistency and simplicity are foundational to owning mental availability. And even as your core message and identity remain rock solid, the manifestation of that story can be relayed with nuance and creativity to match distinctions per channel and specific audience.
How Do You Like Them Apples?
As I type these words on my 16” MacBook Pro laptop, I see this wisdom particularly applies to the Apple brand. Its products are beloved worldwide. In my house right now, I can count 4 Mac computers, 4 iPads and 2 functioning iPhones, plus some decommissioned ones, and an iPod or two, somewhere. It’s shocking to realize, then, that Apple almost went bankrupt back in 1997. Although it would be an exaggeration to say that marketing and branding single-handedly resuscitated the struggling company, it was a key force in its roaring comeback.
Along with ruthlessly paring back the product line to just a few core offerings, streamlining the organizational structure and implementing precise personnel changes, Steve Jobs also invested heavily in the Think Different marketing campaign. “To me, marketing is about values,” said Jobs. “It’s about telling your customers who you are and what you believe. The products you make are an expression of those values.”
As part of his rejuvenation efforts at Apple, Jobs did something unheard of. Without a new product to promote, he invested millions in a sweeping marketing campaign that embodied those values.
It wasn’t flashy, it didn’t have a high production value. But it stood for something singular. Simply, it was a voiceover layered with black-and-white video footage of iconic change-makers, including: Albert Einstein, Bob Dylan, George Harrison and Yoko Ono, Amelia Earhart, Gandhi, Jim Henson and Pablo Picasso, among others.
Here’s the narration: “Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules and they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them. Disagree with them. Glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”
It ends with the words Think Different glowing in white on a black screen.
Through this ad, which cohesively held together the products, the customer experience and the North Star of the company, a new generation of customers saw their own potential in the mirror Apple held up. Essentially, and as you can still see and experience today, the line between marketing and product design blurred.
I recently watched old footage of Jobs holding a small staff meeting where he previews this ad to his employees. He’d been back at Apple only about 8 weeks when he finished it. At a time when the company was famously about 90 days away from bankruptcy, Jobs invested millions in the Think Different campaign.
Second Verse, Same as the First
Apple is still telling this same story 28 years later. The expression of the brand has changed, but its heart beats the same. The brand identity marries seamlessly with the specific creative based around imagining customer pain points and showing the solve through evocative storytelling. How can I be sure my identity and my money stay safe? “Privacy. That’s iPhone.” Or, how can I make sure I don’t miss a word my daughter says or a note she sings? Apple’s 2024 Heartstrings commercial shows how a life is changed by Apple tech, when a hard-of-hearing father puts in his AirPods, adjusts the settings on his iPhone and suddenly, his daughter’s lovely singing voice and accomplished guitar playing snap into high-def resolution. If it doesn’t make you cry, you might not have a heart.
Today, it’s unimaginable to consider that Apple could have disappeared into bankruptcy almost three decades ago. Jobs invested in the brand even when the company was losing billions. That strategy has paid off over the long term, with the company now valued at $3.54 trillion.
When I look at their ad campaigns as a collection, I can see a foundational framework underpinning it all. They have carefully chosen a few key pillars or buckets to use as a rubric to judge if it is a story their brand should be telling or not. That level of discipline pays dividends in a world of scattered resources within companies, as well as scattered attention spans of customers. You don’t need to solve all your customers’ pain points, just the ones in the center of your venn diagram where the circles of brand identity, customer problem and product have the most significant overlap.
