Ehrenberg-Bass News

When marketers (and textbooks) talk about target marketing they can mean different things.

A commonly held belief is that tiny brands are destined to stay small. Resources are extremely limited, making substantial growth seem more challenging than the average Joe conquering Everest. But just as average Joe can scale a mountain with the right training, tiny brands can climb the growth ladder with the right marketing strategy.

Almost all these decisions come from the gut. We’d all be better off if these decisions came from the data instead. And for the data, we turn to Jenni Romaniuk of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, the patron saint of marketing rationalism, who recently published a paper with The B2B Institute entitled – wait for it…’Brand Rejection in B2B’.

Think about the last time you bought a chocolate bar, that moment you saw it on the shelf. You can probably remember how that chocolate bar looked, the colours, patterns, images on the pack, its weight in your hand before you tore open the wrapper, and its smell and taste as you put it in your mouth. All of this engagement of the senses helps refresh existing brand memories, and on occasion, build new ones.

The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute has defined the 95-5 rule, which states that only 5% of B2B buyers are in the market for goods and services at any one time. This means “only 20% of business buyers are ‘in the market’ over the course of an entire year; something like 5% in a quarter – or put another way, 95% aren’t in the market,” according to Professor John Dawes, author of the The B2B Institute’s paper on the topic.