This post summarizes the Executive Guidance podcast episode “Rethinking B2B Marketing: The Power of Brand in Long-Term Growth”, hosted by Toptal’s Jeff Gangemi, with guest Peter Weinberg. We wrote it from our own machine transcript of the episode audio, so wording is paraphrased and the numbers are Weinberg’s spoken claims, not verified data. Check the audio before you quote him.
Weinberg co-founded the LinkedIn B2B Institute and later co-founded Evidenza, a synthetic market research company, with Jon Lombardo. In the episode he argues that B2B companies should invest in brand, not only in bottom-of-funnel lead generation.
Key Takeaways #
- Weinberg says the B2B Institute’s research kept returning to one point: invest in brand at the top of the funnel.
- The 95-5 rule says that in any category about 95% of buyers are not in the market right now. Weinberg says it is a way of thinking about buyers, not a budgeting rule.
- He points to a 50/50 split between brand and in-market activity as a B2B benchmark, and says most B2B companies spend close to 0/100.
- He argues the main obstacles to brand investment in B2B are internal and political, and that finance is a better ally than sales.
- He says brand is a more durable moat than a product that can be copied.
The 95-5 Rule: Memory As Lead Generation #
Weinberg credits the 95-5 rule to Professor Dawes at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and says the B2B Institute helped popularize it. At any moment, he says, something like 95% of buyers in a category are not in the market, and they will buy at some point, whether in days, months or years. So brand growth is less about converting the few in-market buyers and more about building memories of the brand that are recalled when buyers do enter the category. He calls this memory generation, and describes it as the best form of lead generation.
He also says marketers, especially in B2B, spend most of their budget chasing the in-market 5%. That is short term and very competitive, because everyone is doing it, so reaching an in-market buyer is expensive.
Balancing Brand And Performance Marketing #
Weinberg separates the 95-5 rule from budgeting. For budgets he points to Les Binet and Peter Field’s 60/40 rule, which comes from the IPA databank, an econometric data set of hundreds of brands over about 40 years. He says the B2B Institute commissioned a B2B cut of that data, and the answer came back close to 50/50 between brand and bottom-of-funnel activity, since B2B sales cycles are long and closing an in-market buyer takes work. He adds that either ratio would beat what he sees in practice, which he calls a 0/100 rule.
He also pushes back on the label “performance marketing”, which he says implies that other activity does not drive performance, and that bottom-of-funnel activity is the best way to get performance. He does not think either is true.
Creative, Distribution And Distinctiveness #
For the B2B Institute’s three lessons, Weinberg lists investing in brand, then two ways of doing it. On creative, he recommends big bets on repeatable emotional franchises. On distribution, he recommends broad reach over narrow hyper-targeting. He uses Salesforce’s Astro character as an example of a technique common in B2C but rare in B2B. When he describes Evidenza’s own brand, he says its unusual futuristic Italian Renaissance look was chosen because it is distinctive and gets noticed, which he says is the point of branding. The episode notes frame this as distinctiveness, not just differentiation.
Why B2B Brand Investment Meets Internal Resistance #
Weinberg says B2B and B2C are strategically similar: in both, you build a memory of the brand that is recalled at purchase. Tactics differ, mainly because B2B audiences are narrower. The biggest difference, he says, is political. B2B companies are usually product-led or sales-led, and a salesperson wants deals now, not a year from now. His suggestion is that the route to more brand investment runs through finance, because a CFO already thinks about future cash flows, and future cash flows come from future customers.
He is also skeptical that marketing can be given an exact ROI. In his view the conversation should be about a range and about conviction, with projections presented as projections, not about a precise return.
Consideration Sets: Getting On The List #
Weinberg says buyers entering a category typically have two to three brands in mind. He recalls research suggesting that, six months later, roughly 80% to 90% of the time they buy one of the brands on that initial list, and he stresses that he does not want to make the numbers sound precise. His conclusion is that most brands lose by never making the list, and that getting on it through brand marketing is marketing’s first job. We have not checked the research he refers to.
Synthetic Research And What We Did Not Verify #
A large part of the episode covers Evidenza, which uses AI-generated “synthetic” respondents to take surveys. Weinberg says testing showed that these respondents give the same answers as real people, and that results can arrive in hours at far lower cost than traditional research. Those are the company founder’s claims in a podcast interview. We have not tested the product.
He also recommends the book How Brands Grow and Mark Ritson’s online mini MBA as starting points, and says marketing teams need a shared view of marketing effectiveness.
Conclusion #
The core of the episode is Weinberg’s claim that B2B marketing money goes mostly to the small share of buyers who are ready now, while most future customers are not being built toward. He argues for putting brand-building back into the mix. That is one practitioner’s argument, built on research programmes he cites, so test it against your own pipeline data. For primary sources, read the 95:5 rule article he wrote with Jon Lombardo and Marketing Week’s report on the Ehrenberg-Bass research.
