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The 95-5 Rule
The proposition that at any given moment roughly 95% of business buyers are not in the market, so most advertising has to work by being remembered later rather than by converting now.
John Dawes, Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, for the LinkedIn B2B Institute (2021)
What it does
Reframes B2B advertising from lead capture to memory building. If nineteen in twenty people who see the ad cannot buy today, then the job of the ad is to be recalled when they can — which changes what you measure, how long you wait, and how much of the budget goes to people who will not respond this quarter.
When it breaks
The 95/5 split is a derived estimate, not a measurement. It comes from average purchase-cycle length: divide the share of buyers who transact in a year by the length of the cycle and you get the in-market proportion. In categories with short cycles, high growth, or frequent re-purchase, the in-market share is materially higher and the rule under-invests in capture. It is a reminder of proportion, not a constant.
Case
The LinkedIn B2B Institute published the rule with Ehrenberg-Bass, deriving it from purchase-cycle length across B2B categories, and used it to argue for a brand-building majority of B2B budgets. Ehrenberg-Bass's own write-up presents it as an order-of-magnitude argument about advertising's job rather than a fixed ratio.
LinkedIn B2B Institute — The 95-5 Rule ↗Diagram — not yet drawn
A large block of buyers with a thin lit strip at one edge representing the in-market few; arrows from advertising land on the dark block rather than the strip, and a second timeline shows the strip moving across the block over the purchase cycle.
In the wild
Unvetted · not part of the tier assessment
What has been written about this tool in the last twelve months. Machine-retrieved and unchecked — everything above this line was checked.
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