Field Notes
By Jason Kumpf, Strategy Advisor · September 14, 2026
Every marketing budget answers a question, whether or not anyone states it out loud. Does this dollar chase the buyer who is ready today, or does it build the memory that wins the buyer who is ready next year. Companies that treat this as an either-or choice tend to plateau. The ones that treat it as a ratio tend to compound.
That ratio has a name. Les Binet and Peter Field, analyzing 996 case studies submitted to the IPA Effectiveness Awards between 1980 and 2010, found that campaigns splitting investment close to 60 percent toward long-term brand building and 40 percent toward short-term activation produced the strongest long-run business results, according to a summary of their research published by Alex Murrell. Activation drives the immediate spike. Brand building drives the years afterward. The two feed each other, and the data shows the split between them is not a matter of preference.
The logic becomes sharper once you look at who is actually available to buy at any given moment. LinkedIn's B2B Institute, working with the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science, frames this as the 95-5 rule: at any point in time, only around 5 percent of a company's potential buyers are actively in the market for what it sells. The other 95 percent are not ignoring the category. They simply are not shopping yet, and their next purchase cycle may be a year or several years away. A budget aimed entirely at the 5 percent who are in market today leaves the other 95 percent to form their impressions of every vendor without you in the room. Brand investment is what puts you in the room before the buying window opens.
Share of voice data shows how that investment compounds. Nielsen's analysis of the same effectiveness research found that a brand holding share of voice 10 percentage points above its share of market tends to gain roughly half a percentage point of market share per year. Half a point sounds small next to a quarterly pipeline target. Held for five years running, it is the difference between a company that is quietly gaining ground and one that is standing still while competitors gain it instead.
The risk of the alternative shows up clearly in the newest data. Speaking earlier this year, Binet reported that budget size is roughly eight to nine times more important to profit growth than efficiency gains from optimizing return on that spend, according to B&T's coverage of his remarks. Yet the CMOs he surveyed believed the opposite by a wide margin, rating ROI as twice as important as budget. That gap matters because it explains a pattern many growth teams recognize: a demand engine gets more efficient every quarter, cost per lead falls, conversion rate improves, and the business still stalls, because the efficiency gains were never going to produce the reach and memory that only sustained brand investment builds. Optimizing the 40 percent harder does not substitute for funding the 60 percent at all.
None of this argues against demand generation. Short-term activation remains the fastest way to convert the buyers who are ready now, and it produces the measurable results that justify a budget in the room where decisions get made. The 60/40 rule simply insists that activation cannot carry the whole load. It was never built to reach the buyer who will enter the market eighteen months from now, and no amount of targeting refinement changes that. Brand building is the mechanism that reaches them early enough that your name is already familiar when they finally start looking.
For companies building a demand pipeline, the practical takeaway is a planning discipline rather than a slogan. Set the split deliberately, in writing, at the point where budgets get built, rather than letting it drift toward whichever line item is easiest to measure this quarter. Protect the brand-building share even when a demand campaign posts strong short-term numbers, because those numbers describe this quarter's buyers, not next year's. Track share of voice against share of market the way a finance team tracks any other leading indicator, since it is one of the few brand metrics with a documented link to future share gains.
The 60/40 rule holds up because it describes how buying decisions actually get made, over months and years, by people who are mostly not paying attention until they suddenly are. A pipeline built entirely on demand generation captures today's buyers efficiently and hands tomorrow's buyers to whichever competitor spent the years in between building a name they recognized first.
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