Why most of your future customers are not ready to buy yet (and what that means for your budget)

A follow-up to our plain-English guide to media planning and buying.

In our last post, we made the case that you do not need millions to do media well. You need a plan, a sharp eye for value, and the discipline to spend where it counts. All still true. But there is a deeper reason that ambitious brands, whether they sell to consumers or to other businesses, so often hit a ceiling and cannot work out why. It has a name, and once you understand it, your whole approach to spending changes.

It is called the 95-5 rule, and it is one of the most useful ideas in modern marketing.

Only a small slice of your market is ready to buy right now

The rule comes from Professor John Dawes at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, and it was popularised by Peter Weinberg and Jon Lombardo through LinkedIn’s B2B Institute. The observation is simple, almost obvious once you hear it, but also somewhat uncomfortable.

At any given moment, only around 5% of your potential buyers are actually in market, ready to make a decision. The other 95% are not shopping. They are perfectly happy, busy with other things, or simply do not need what you sell today. They might, at some point, but not now.

Here is the part that catches people out. You cannot persuade that 95% to buy sooner. As the Ehrenberg-Bass team put it, marketers do not move buyers immediately into the market. Buyers move themselves, based on their own needs and timing. What you can do is make sure that when they finally are ready, yours is the brand that springs to mind. Or, in Professor Jenni Romaniuk’s lovely phrase, you “catch buyers as they fall”. The brand that gets trusted and remembered is the brand that gets bought.

This means that your marketing today is converting people that have been building associations with your brand for a while, and it is also working on your future customers. Instead of expecting immediate results, the majority of the effort should go to building memory with future buyers, with the rest converting the ones ready today.

This is not just a B2B idea

The 95-5 rule was first studied in business-to-business settings, where buying cycles are long and the maths is easy to see. A company might switch payroll provider once every five years, so only a small fraction are ever in the market at once.

But the principle holds for consumer brands, which is what often gets missed. It is simply a matter of purchase cycles. People buy a new mattress roughly once a decade, so in any given quarter only a tiny percentage are shopping for one. The rest are asleep on the one they already own. Even in everyday categories like snacks or household goods, most of your buyers are light buyers who purchase once or twice a year and are not thinking about you the rest of the time. Habit and familiarity do the heavy lifting in the moment of choice.

So whether you sell software or sofas, sandwiches or accountancy services, the same truth applies. Most of the people who will ever buy from you are not ready yet. They are tomorrow’s customers, and they are the biggest growth opportunity you have.

Why most budgets quietly ignore the 95%

The fix: be remembered before the buying moment

Brands with a growth mindset behave less like hunters chasing the next immediate sale, and more like farmers planting for a harvest that comes later. They keep capturing the 5% who are ready now, while patiently building memory with the 95% who are not.

In practice that means investing in work that is distinctive and emotionally memorable, and showing up consistently so your brand becomes familiar long before anyone needs you. Done well, by the time a buyer’s moment arrives, choosing you feels easy and obvious.

Crucially, this is not a question of one type of media being good and another bad. Reaching future buyers is about the balance of your spending, not a war between channels. Brand building can happen on television and on social, on a poster site and in a podcast, in the national press and in a beautifully made digital campaign. What matters is that some of your budget is deliberately working to be remembered, rather than every last pound fighting over this week’s shoppers.

And no, you still do not need millions

The old objection is that reaching a broad future audience is a luxury only big brands can afford. That is increasingly out of date. The media landscape has opened up. Connected and on-demand television lets smaller brands buy into the screen affordably. Radio, out of home and national press can all be bought in sensible, targeted ways. And plenty of brand-building can be done cost-effectively across digital channels too. The opportunity to reach tomorrow’s customers has never been more within reach of a modest budget.

The skill is in getting the split right, and in buying each piece well, so that your money builds memory and captures demand at the same time.

Where Hurst Media Agency comes in

This is exactly the balance we help brands strike, and it is harder to get right alone than it looks. Lean too far towards immediate conversion and you cap your own growth. If you take your eye off those who are ready the sales feel slow to arrive.

As trusted media brokers, Hurst Media Agency plans and buys across the full mix. Because we are channel-neutral, our advice is about the right blend for your brand and your budget, not about selling you one format. We help you keep converting the buyers who are ready today while steadily building the familiarity that wins tomorrow’s. And because we buy this space every day, we make a modest budget reach far.

You do not need a big brand’s budget to think like a big brand.

Ready to reach tomorrow’s customers, not just today’s?

If your results have plateaued, or your acquisition costs keep creeping up, the answer is rarely to bid harder for the same few shoppers. It is to broaden your reach to the future buyers everyone else is ignoring.

Book a free, no-obligation consultation with Hurst Media Agency, and let us help you balance demand today with growth for tomorrow. Drop us an email to sales@hurstmediaagency.co.uk and we’ll be happy to chat bout what would work for your brand.