The 95% Ledger

Most marketing is aimed at the 5% of buyers ready to buy today.

Which means most marketing is wasted by design. And the industry has a name for that waste. It calls it "performance."

Here is the math that made me put my own budget on the table. John Dawes and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute call it the 95-5 rule. If your customer comes back to the market roughly every five years, about 5% of your buyers are shopping in any given quarter. The other 95% are just living their lives, not clicking anything. Dawes himself calls it a heuristic, not a law. Fine. Even as a rough guess, it is a rough guess I had never once budgeted against.

And the trap: my dashboard cannot see those 95%. It only reports on people who click, which is the in-market 5%. So every week the numbers politely tell me to spend more on the smallest slice of the market. Binet and Field found the same short-term pull, and their benchmark says roughly 60:40 brand building to activation. The dashboard never suggests 60:40. It suggests more retargeting.

So I built a fix. I call it the 95% Ledger.

1. Find your cycle

One question to existing buyers: how often do you re-enter this market? That answer sets everything else, because the 95-5 split is a function of cycle length. Fast-cycle categories sit closer to 60:40. Slow-cycle ones live deeper in the 95.

2. Sort every line

Each activity goes IN (reaches buyers ready now) or OUT (reaches the 95%). Be honest with the sorting. Search ads: IN. Retargeting: IN. That podcast sponsorship nobody can attribute: OUT, and probably the most valuable line on the page.

3. Set the ratio and the metrics

OUT work gets measured on memory, not clicks. Start at Binet-Field's 60:40, adjust for your cycle. The metric that matters for OUT is whether the 95% would recognise you, trust you, and think of you first when they do come back to market.

Then take it to your CFO. They will not hear "brand." They will hear current cash flow versus future cash flow, and the meeting changes.

The 5% buy today. The 95% decide who they buy from today.