I am a student of stupid phrases.

“There are many ways to skin a cat” - ok, how about no cat skinning at all? Just as, like, common courtesy? Cats need their skin (I believe, I'm not a vet) and I cannot think of a single reason why we would need it.

“You can’t have your cake and eat it too”.

My mum used to like this one.  And I always thought: yes I can. By definition, mother, my eating said cake will also mean that I am literally having it too.

We’re getting off track. The point of the saying (the cake one, not the cat one) is that you can’t have it both ways. Well, my brothers and sisters in B2B, when it comes to how marketing contributes to the growth of your business we must absolutely insist on having it both ways.

Once upon a time in B2B you ‘did brand’ or you ‘did performance’ and the two shall only ever meet begrudgingly. And as a crude division, ‘doing brand’ was all about the long term and performance was about the short term.

So, I suppose, to risk stretching the metaphor to breaking point: you built your brand cake and then it was done. Next you tried to get people to eat it with targeted activity. There was little consideration for the fact that a lot of people (~95% in fact, but more on that later) probs didn't want cake at that exact moment in time.

This orthodoxy held for a long time, a status quo that kept classic B2B marketing firmly in its place.

The only problem was basically every request for a ‘brand awareness’ campaign in B2B basically always had ‘deliver leads’ as a KPI. People really do want to both have their cake and eat it, you know.

And then, just over a decade ago, B2B started addressing things like ‘brand building’ and ‘effectiveness' with a renewed seriousness. In 2013 Binet & Field published ‘The Long and Short of it’ and people have been arguing about it on LinkedIn ever since.

The TL;DR in case it's useful:

There’s a lot more in the book too, and reams of evidence to support all this stuff. I know you’d rather be watching Great British Homes in the Sun or something like that, but honestly the book is still a vital read if you want to make marketing that actually works. 

Fast forward to 2021: Taylor wins a Grammy for Folklore whilst Timmy Chalomet rides a giant worm in Dune. But more importantly for us, Professor John Dawes from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute coined the 95:5 rule. 

It suggests that at any given time, only 5% of potential customers are in-market to buy from you. Meaning 95%, aka everyone else, are not.

Now, it's worth noting that some people have gotten all riled up in a silly semantic argument over the use of the word ‘rule’. 

95:5 isn’t a rule in the same way that ‘don’t do fraud’ is a rule. It’s more of a useful heuristic in the vein of ‘don't swim directly after eating’ or the pareto principle.

If you want to know how many of your customers are actually in-market at any given time, it takes a bit of work. But the basic approach is this:

This, unsurprisingly, has some implications:

Ok, so what can we learn from two industry defining pieces of research a decade apart?

The joy of bothism. The necessary splendour of having your cake and encouraging others to eat it too, now and in the future. This means focusing on the future and the present, engaging hearts as well as heads, being an available brand and a memorable brand. 

I’m not saying this is easy.  But we at fst, and people much smarter than us, are saying that it’s the best shot at meaningful, sustainable growth that B2B brands have.

So the obvious question: how do we come up with big campaign ideas that rattle down the funnel all the way from brand awareness to conversion focused performance marketing?

That’s a topic for another time, but I assure you there’s more than one way to skin a cat.