Module 1 — Strategy · Lesson 1.1
What Marketing Is For
Brand and activation, mental availability, and why most of your buyers are not buying today
What you'll learn
- Distinguish brand building from sales activation and explain why both are needed
- Explain mental availability and why brands grow mainly by adding buyers
- Apply the 95-5 rule to decide what share of effort targets people who are not in market
- Write a one-paragraph statement of what your marketing is for that the team can plan against
Ask ten founders what marketing is for and you will get ten answers: leads, awareness, pipeline, 'getting our name out', content, community. Each is a means, and teams that never settle the end tend to switch means every quarter. The evidence-based answer is narrower and more useful. Marketing exists to make more people buy, more often and at better prices, than would have without it — and it does that through two mechanisms that behave very differently over time.
Two jobs on two clocks
In 2013 Les Binet and Peter Field published The Long and the Short of It for the IPA, a meta-analysis of 996 campaigns across roughly 700 brands and 83 categories drawn from the IPA Effectiveness Databank. Their central distinction is between sales activation — work aimed at a response now, such as a promotion, a direct-response ad, or a sales email — and brand building, work that changes what people remember and feel about a brand so that future buying is easier and less price-sensitive.
The two behave differently. Activation produces short-term spikes that are easy to measure and decay quickly. Brand effects build slowly, are hard to see in a week, and drive most of the long-term growth and profit. The authors' summary is blunt: there are no long-term effects without short-term ones, but the two are different, and you need both. Their analysis found that, on average, the most effective balance of budget was roughly 60% brand building to 40% activation — the widely quoted 60:40 rule — and that integrating the two could roughly double efficiency compared with either alone.
Two cautions keep this honest. First, 60:40 is an average across consumer and business categories, not a law for your company; the IPA's own later work (Effectiveness in Context, 2018) put the figure at 62:38, but an average across many brands still says little about the right balance for any single one. Second, the databank is made of award entries, which skews toward larger advertisers. A five-person company does not need a television budget to take the lesson; it needs to notice that if every hour goes to activation, nothing is building the memory that makes next year's activation work.
How brands actually grow
The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute at the University of South Australia has spent decades studying buying data across categories and countries. Its most cited regularity is double jeopardy: smaller brands have fewer buyers, and those buyers are also slightly less loyal. The practical consequence the Institute draws is that brands grow mainly by increasing penetration — the number of people who buy at all in a period — rather than by squeezing more loyalty out of existing customers. Its writing on acquisition versus retention puts it directly: pulling the loyalty lever harder than the acquisition lever will not have a significant impact on growth.
The mechanism behind penetration is what the Institute calls mental availability: the propensity of a brand to be noticed or come to mind in buying situations. Jenni Romaniuk and Byron Sharp's definition of brand salience makes the point that this is not top-of-mind awareness of one cue (the category name) but a web of memories linking the brand to the many situations in which someone might buy — 'when my reporting falls apart at quarter end', 'when we hire our first account manager'. The more of those situations your brand is linked to, in the minds of more category buyers, the more often you are on the shortlist without having been searched for.
This framework has critics, and the Institute is an advocate for its own findings. But its core claims rest on large purchase panels, and they are a useful corrective to a common small-company error: treating the existing customer list as the market.
The 95-5 rule: most buyers are out of market
Business buyers do not buy most categories often. The LinkedIn B2B Institute, drawing on joint work with Ehrenberg-Bass, summarizes this as the 95-5 rule: at any given time, about 95% of your potential buyers are not ready to buy. The page illustrates it with purchase cycles — most companies replace computers about once every four years and change banking services about once every five.
If that is roughly right for your category, two things follow. Work aimed only at people ready to buy today — lead capture, demo requests, outbound to an intent list — addresses a small fraction of your future revenue. And the job of everything else is to be remembered by the 95% when they move into the market, which may be next quarter or in three years. That is brand work, even when it looks like a newsletter, a useful tool, a talk at a conference or a well-maintained reputation in a niche community.
None of this means activation is lesser. The 5% are real money now, and a company that cannot convert the in-market buyer will not survive to enjoy its brand. The rule is a correction to the instinct to measure everything by this month's leads.
Writing down what your marketing is for
The output of this lesson is one paragraph the whole team can plan against. It names the buyers you are trying to reach, the buying situations you want to be remembered in, the balance of effort you intend between brand and activation, and the one number you will watch to know whether it is working.
A workable example for a small B2B services firm: 'Our marketing exists to make operations leaders at 20–200 person agencies think of us when their reporting breaks. Roughly half our effort goes to staying memorable to the many who are not shopping (the newsletter, the benchmark report, two talks a year); half goes to converting the few who are (the audit offer, follow-up within a day). We judge it by new qualified conversations per month and, twice a year, by unprompted recall in customer interviews.'
The split you choose is a judgement, not a measurement — you will rarely be able to measure brand effects precisely at small scale, and Module 5 is candid about why. What matters is that the split is chosen deliberately and written down, so that a bad month of leads does not quietly turn every hour into activation.
Write the purpose down where the agent can read it
- 1
On /workspace-kvn, put your marketing paragraph into the Vision field (or the project charter of a dedicated Marketing project). The agent reads the charter when it drafts and plans, so a written purpose shapes what it proposes.
- 2
Set one North Star for marketing
In the North Star section of /workspace-kvn, define the number you named (for example 'new qualified conversations per month'), its baseline, target and horizon. Kavanah does not compute marketing metrics for you — you record each reading. The North Star never blocks work; it changes what the agent says about whether a task moves the number.
- 3
Create a Marketing project with two lanes
On /projects/tasks, create a project for marketing and tag tasks as brand or activation. Reviewing the ratio of completed tasks in each lane once a month is a crude but honest check on whether your intended split is the one you are actually running.
What to watch
- Brand-versus-activation effort split
- Share of completed marketing tasks (or hours) tagged brand versus activation over the last 30 days. You compute it from the task board.
- Healthy signal: Close to the split you wrote down. A drift toward 100% activation after a weak month is the pattern to catch. (Our recommended starting point is to treat any month above 80% activation as a prompt for review, not a research finding.)
- New qualified conversations per month
- First conversations with people who fit your target, from any source. Recorded manually or counted from new deals in the Deal Room.
- Healthy signal: Trending up over two quarters; month-to-month noise is expected at small scale.
- Unprompted recall in interviews
- Of category buyers you interview who are not customers, the share who name you when asked who they would consider. A small-sample proxy for mental availability.
- Healthy signal: Any upward movement across two interview rounds; treat small samples as directional only.
Key takeaways
- ·Marketing has two jobs on two clocks: activation converts the few in market now; brand building makes future buying easier.
- ·The IPA's 60:40 balance is an average across many categories — use it to avoid an all-activation plan, not as a rule.
- ·Brands grow mainly by adding buyers, through mental availability across many buying situations.
- ·Most B2B buyers are out of market at any moment, so measuring marketing only by this month's leads undercounts most of what it does.
Knowing what marketing is for tells you to be remembered in buying situations. It does not tell you which situations, or by whom. That comes from talking to customers — the subject of the next lesson.
Sources
- 1.The Long and the Short of It: 10 key principles of success (presentation)
Les Binet and Peter Field · IPA · 2013
Meta-analysis of 996 campaigns, ~700 brands, 83 categories; short- and long-term effects differ and both are needed; the 60:40 brand-to-activation balance; integration can double efficiency.
- 2.The next chapter for 'The Long and The Short of It'
Alison Hoad · IPA blog · 2023
Ten-year retrospective: the 60:40 finding, its refinement to 62:38 in Effectiveness in Context (2018), and the growing share of short-term activity.
- 3.Effective brand growth: Acquisition or retention?
Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science · marketingscience.info · 2021
Double jeopardy and the case that brands grow mainly by acquiring buyers rather than by raising loyalty.
- 4.How to measure Brand Salience
Byron Sharp, Ehrenberg-Bass Institute · marketingscience.info · 2008
Romaniuk and Sharp's definition of salience — the propensity of a brand to be noticed or come to mind in buying situations — and why it is cue-dependent.
- 5.The 95-5 Rule
LinkedIn B2B Institute · LinkedIn Marketing Solutions · 2025
About 95% of potential B2B buyers are not ready to buy at any given time; purchase-cycle examples; the implication that brand advertising builds memories for future buying.