Do you believe it if I tell you most of your prospect customers are not actively shopping? This can be explained by what we called the 95-5 Rule. According to the LinkedIn B2B Institute, roughly 95% of B2B buyers are out of market, while only about 5% are actively in market. This rule points to one interesting fact: most of the people who will eventually buy from you are not yet ready to buy today!
And yet, most marketing budgets are still built as if everyone is.
That mismatch is more expensive than it looks. When companies put nearly all their spend into lead capture, retargeting, short-term paid media, and conversion-focused sales support, they are effectively competing for the same narrow slice of current demand while neglecting the much larger group that will matter later. Brand marketing exists to close that gap. Its job is not to generate instant demand on command, but to build memory, familiarity, credibility, and preference before a buyer enters an active buying cycle.
The irony is that marketers often know this intuitively, but budget pressure pulls them in the opposite direction. LinkedIn’s B2B Institute notes that 96% of B2B marketers expected to see the main effect of their ad campaigns within two weeks, which helps explain why so much spend still gets pushed toward immediate-response activity rather than long-term brand building. Source
That short-term mindset is understandable. Boards want pipeline. Finance wants proof. Revenue teams want speed. But if your marketing system only captures existing demand and does little to shape future demand, you end up working harder every quarter just to stand still.
Source: LinkedIn The B2B Institute
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The Problem With Chasing the 5% and Ignoring Brand Marketing
Modern B2B buying behaviour makes this even clearer.
According to Gartner’s public 2025 sales research, 61% of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free buying experience, 73% actively avoid suppliers that send irrelevant outreach, and 69% report inconsistencies between what a company’s website says and what its sellers say. Source
The latest research from Gartner in 2026 has reinforced this findings. We can see that the trend is intensifying with 67% of B2B buyers now say they prefer a rep-free experience, and 45% say they used AI during a recent purchase. Source
What marketing insights we can get here? It simply tells us that many buyers are forming impressions, filtering vendors, and building shortlists long before they fill out a form or speak to a salesperson. It also means that when demand becomes visible in your CRM, a large part of the commercial decision has already been shaped.
This is where brand marketing does its most important work. Not in the last mile, but in the long middle period before urgency appears.
The LinkedIn B2B Institute’s broader Brand and Demand research argues that B2B growth is strongest when companies balance long-term brand building with short-term activation. Its recommended split is 46% brand marketing and 54% demand marketing. The same report says organisations that invest 50% of budget in brand tend to see stronger financial performance. Source
That is a useful corrective to the common mistake of treating brand as a luxury and demand generation as the only “serious” marketing.
Brand marketing is not the soft, fluffy part of marketing. It is the part that reduces future acquisition friction.
Buyers Don’t Discover Brands Through One Channel
Another reason brand marketing matters is that buyers rarely discover companies through a single touchpoint.
DataReportal’s 2025 global brand discovery research shows that the typical adult internet user discovers brands and products through an average of 5.8 different sources. Globally, 32.8% say they discover brands through search engines, 32.3% through TV ads, 29.7% through social media ads, and 25.8% through brand websites. Source
That should immediately challenge the idea that one channel alone can do the whole job.
Search remains critical, but it is not sufficient on its own. Even the top source in the study — search engines at 32.8% — reaches only about one-third of connected consumers. DataReportal’s conclusion is essentially that the mix is the fix: marketers need multiple channels because no single channel introduces brands to enough people on its own. Source
That is exactly why brand marketing should not be reduced to “awareness” in the dismissive sense. It is not about vague visibility for its own sake. It is about building recognisable mental availability across the places buyers actually learn, compare, and remember.
This becomes even more important in categories with long consideration cycles or complex buying committees. LinkedIn’s Brand and Demand research says 6.8 people are typically involved in each B2B purchase decision. Source
So the practical question is no longer, “Did one ad generate one lead?”
It is, “Are we consistently showing up in enough credible places that the buying group recognises and trusts us when the need appears?”
That is a brand marketing question.
Source: GWI (Q3 2024)
Why Short-Term ROI Pressure Can Destruct Your Marketing Strategy
All marketing management can tell you that their pressure to focus on the 5% is real. Here’s a recent research helps explain why.
Gartner’s 2025 CMO Spend Survey found that marketing budgets remained flat at 7.7% of overall company revenue. At the same time, there were 59% of CMOs said they had insufficient budget to execute their strategy. Source
The latest CMO Survey adds another layer. It reports that marketing budgets have fallen to 9.0% of revenues and 9.6% of overall budgets, while overall marketing spending grew just 1.7% over the prior 12 months. Source
In that kind of environment, it is easy to see why leaders ask for quick proof. The problem is that the way many organisations measure marketing is still misaligned with how B2B buying actually works.
LinkedIn’s Brand and Demand report says 96% of marketers measure ROI within three months, even though the average B2B sales cycle is six months. Source
If you judge all marketing on a timetable shorter than the buying cycle itself, you will almost inevitably underfund brand. You will end up rewarding whatever captures already-existing intent and penalising the activity that quietly shapes future intent.
That does not mean demand generation is wrong. It means demand generation alone is incomplete.
Brand Marketing Is What Pre-Sells the Future Buyer
As an experienced brand marketer, I can share with you that we should think about brand marketing as a technique to “pre-sell” buyers before they become active.
The pre-sells happen through repeated exposure to useful, credible, distinctive signals. These signals include thought leadership, memorable creative, category commentary, events, executive presence, product narratives, customer proof, and consistent messaging across channels.
This is also where many B2B brands are weaker than they realise.
Marketing Week reported on LinkedIn B2B Institute and System1 research covering 1,600 B2B ads seen by 6 million people worldwide. The striking finding: 75% of B2B ads scored one star or less, which meant they had little or no potential to drive long-term market share growth. None of the 1,600 ads achieved the top five-star score. Source
That matters because forgettable marketing does not accumulate value. If your content is rational but indistinct, technically accurate but emotionally flat, visible but not memorable, it does very little to help your brand come to mind later.
The same Marketing Week article notes that five-star ads have been found to help brands grow by an average of 3% in the long term. Source
That is a useful reminder that brand marketing is not only about frequency. It is also about distinctiveness and memorability. The goal is not to be louder; it is to be easier to remember when buying conditions change.
Thought Leadership Is Brand Marketing, Not Just Content Marketing
In B2B, one of the most underappreciated forms of brand marketing is thought leadership.
Edelman and LinkedIn’s 2025 B2B Thought Leadership report says more than 40% of B2B deals stall because of internal misalignment within buying groups. Source
LinkedIn’s related write-up adds that 64% of target buyers and 63% of hidden buyers spend more than an hour per week consuming thought leadership, while 56% of target buyers and 55% of hidden buyers use thought leadership as part of their vendor evaluation process. Source
That is not a side activity. That is part of how buying decisions are made.
The same research shows that 41% of target buyers and 35% of hidden buyers say a C-suite executive encouraged them to consider a vendor after engaging with that vendor’s thought leadership. Source
This is precisely why companies that dismiss brand marketing as “too top-of-funnel” are often missing the commercial point. High-quality thought leadership does not just attract attention. It creates familiarity and credibility inside the buying group before the formal buying moment begins.
And because buying groups increasingly include hidden stakeholders, that matters more than ever.
Why Brand Marketing Matters Even More in the Age of AI Search
There is another reason this conversation has become more urgent: buyers now discover and evaluate brands in AI-shaped environments.
Bain reports that about 80% of consumers rely on zero-click or AI-generated results for at least 40% of their searches, reducing organic web traffic by an estimated 15% to 25%. Source
Pew Research adds that when users encountered an AI summary in Google search, they clicked a traditional result in only 8% of visits, versus 15% when no AI summary appeared. Source
In practical terms, this means buyers can now form opinions without visiting your website nearly as often as before.
That does not make brand marketing less important. It makes it more important.
It’s an AI-mediated discovery environment nowadays. Buyers become more likely to remember a brand they have already seen, heard of, or mentally filed as credible. Brand familiarity becomes a shortcut for trust. If your company has built useful mental associations, you are far more likely to be believed when buyers encounter you indirectly through search summaries, social content, peer mentions, or AI-generated answers. And these mental associations can be built through thought leadership, strong messaging, distinctive creative, and consistent presence.
You can say this is a branding issue. But it is also a modern SEO and GEO issue.
Source: Bain-Dynata Generative AI Consumer Survey, December 2024
How to Balance Brand Marketing and Lead Generation
None of this means marketers should abandon demand generation.
They should balance it.
That is the point. The strongest B2B companies do both at the same time.
In the short term, they still invest in lead generation, retargeting, sales enablement, and conversion optimisation for buyers already in market.
In the long term, they build brand memory through useful content, thought leadership, distinctive creative, executive visibility, events, and consistent category presence.
That balance is not philosophical. It is operational.
If your marketing team wants a more practical rule of thumb, start here:
- Keep capturing demand that already exists.
- Stop expecting every marketing activity to pay back immediately.
- Build content for buyers before they need you, not only when they do.
- Measure success beyond leads alone: branded search, direct traffic quality, share of voice, recall, shortlist presence, sales cycle efficiency, and win-rate lift.
- Treat thought leadership and brand consistency as pipeline infrastructure, not decorative extras.
The brands that win are usually not the brands that shout hardest at the 5%.
They are the brands that stay useful and memorable with the 95%, so that when demand finally appears, the decision already feels easier.
That is what brand marketing is really doing.
Not replacing demand generation.
Not opposing performance marketing.
Not delaying results for the sake of theory.
It is reducing the cost of future demand capture by shaping buyer memory before the market turns in your favour.
And in a B2B world where buyers are more self-directed, more digitally mediated, and more influenced by trust signals than ever, that is not optional.
It is the work.
Today one of the hottest strategic conversations among B2B marketing leaders is: How to balance short-term pipeline with long-term brand investment? It is a fascinating tension, and one worth thorough thinking before making decision. Wanna discuss with us on how to make a balance?
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