INTENTIONALThe Other Ninety-Five
On brand, performance and the buyers who are not ready yet·August 2026

buyers in your category cannot buy today. Intentional is the brand and growth consultancy for consumer brands that have stopped growing.

Almost the entire marketing budget is aimed at the five who can buy, and it is working exactly as designed, which is precisely what makes this so difficult to see.

This is a short paper for the person who signs off the marketing spend at a growing consumer brand. It is about a decision nobody remembers making, why the numbers cannot show it to you, and what the evidence actually says about the mix.

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01The part nobody says out loud

Everything is working. Nothing is compounding.

The dashboards are green. Cost per acquisition is defensible. There is a report that goes to the board every month saying the marketing is performing, and every number in it is technically true.

And still there is the persistent, unprovable feeling of running to stay still. That if the spend stopped on Friday the business would go quiet by the middle of the following week. That last year's growth cost more than the year before, and next year's will cost more again.

That instinct is correct, and it is not a reflection of how well the job is being done. It is what happens when a system is working exactly as it was built to work.

There is real pressure to prove performance quickly, in numbers, to people who are not asking anyone to build something that pays back in three years. So the budget keeps drifting toward whatever reports back by Friday.
The performance plateau
highlow Early gainsToday the plateau begins SpendRevenue
The performance plateau, after Tom Roach: performance investment delivers real early gains, then flattens, while spend keeps climbing to hold the same ground. Read Tom Roach on the plateau →
02In five minutes

If that lands, here is the whole argument

Five minutes on why the returns will not resolve, and what the evidence says about the mix. The written version continues below.

Video · drop reel here
03What is actually working against you
💀

The villain is not a channel. It is a reporting bias.

One hundred buyers in the category. Roughly five are in the market right now. The other ninety-five are not, and no budget makes somebody ready before they are ready. Performance marketing is extraordinarily good at capturing those five, because that is precisely what it was engineered to do.

The trouble is that only the work aimed at those five can prove itself. Every quarter, the attributable half defends itself easily and the compounding half cannot produce a number, so it gets trimmed. Then trimmed again. Nobody decides this. The budget quietly reshapes itself around whatever is easiest to prove, one defensible decision at a time.

Category buyers not in market at any given moment
~95%
the 95:5 rule, Ehrenberg-Bass Institute; a cross-category heuristic, not a measurement of yours
Long-run effectiveness optimum, brand share of budget
~60%
IPA databank analysis, Binet & Field
Where the market actually drifted
~33%
roughly two-thirds now sits in performance, the opposite direction
Of that spend, the half attribution most overstates
The trackable one
the half that reports back is also the half most likely to claim credit it has not earned
04The shape underneath the number

Less than 10% will buy today

So why is more than 90% of your budget targeting them?

Chet Holmes mapped this in The Ultimate Sales Machine. Any market, at any moment, sorts into five groups, and only the top sliver is available to a campaign built to convert.

3%Buying now
7%Open to it
30%Not thinking about it
30%Believe they are not interested
30%Know they are not interested
Reachable by a campaign built to convert — 10%
Reachable only by being known before they look — 90%

Two things follow. The first is that a budget aimed entirely at the top two bands is competing for a tenth of the market against everyone else doing the same. The second is that the ninety percent underneath do not stay there. They move upward on their own schedule, and they arrive at the top already carrying a preference formed while nobody was selling to them.

This is the same finding as the ninety-five, arriving from a different direction: the work that reaches the bottom of the pyramid cannot be attributed, and it is the only work that changes who is standing at the top of it next year.

Buyer distribution after Chet Holmes, The Ultimate Sales Machine (2007). Proportions are a widely used heuristic, not a measurement of any single category.

05What it costs to leave alone

Demand that is rented has to be re-rented every month

A business that only ever converts the five percent has to buy that audience again next month, against competitors bidding for the same small pool, at a price that rises every year. Growth stops feeling like momentum and starts feeling like a subscription.

Meanwhile the ninety-five are forming preferences. Not from advertising alone, but from familiarity, reputation and the accumulated sense of who a category's serious brands are. Those buyers will eventually arrive ready to purchase, and the decision about who they arrive ready to purchase from is being made right now, quietly, elsewhere.

This is the honest version, and it is uncomfortable: you cannot see what the marketing is returning, because it was spent where it was always going to be invisible. Privacy changes and platform fragmentation are real. They are not why the number will not resolve.
06Who is telling you this, and why

Intentional got this wrong first, and at length

Intentional is a commercial growth advisory in Melbourne. For over a decade it has closed the gap between marketing investment and commercial outcomes for consumer businesses, from strategy through to execution, for brands including Cochlear, Bellroy, Patagonia, Thankyou, Frank Body, Orbitkey and Ivory & Deene.

It is also a practice that argued the opposite case for years, which is the more useful qualification.

Chris FraserChris Fraser · Founder, Intentional
“I was all in on performance, and I won the argument every time.”
I could take an account, find the inefficiency and move the number. When somebody argued for brand spend I asked them to show me the attribution, and they usually could not, so I won. Winning that argument was the mistake. I was measuring the half of the work that reports back and quietly defunding the half that compounds, then calling it rigour. The right answer was never brand instead of performance. It was the mix, held deliberately, by somebody willing to protect the part that cannot take credit for itself.
Why it matters here
The seat that decides the mix is usually empty.
Most growing brands never fill this role: the senior head who connects the money, the measurement and the creative, and is accountable for the balance between them. It is the seat a business would otherwise hire at $130k and struggle to fill with somebody who genuinely holds both halves. In the absence of that seat, the mix is set by whichever half reports fastest.
Clients served since 2011 · Intentional brands

“Intentional's services are personal and tailored to our business. Our purchase intent, conversion rate and revenue have all grown. They communicate regularly and include us on the strategy.”

07This is not a hunch

Three bodies of work already settled this

None of this is proprietary theory, and none of it is new. It is among the most replicated findings in modern marketing effectiveness, and it has been sitting in plain sight for a decade.

Brand share of budget
Long-run effectiveness optimum against where the market actually sits.
The optimum
~60%
The market
~33%
The gap between those two bars is the whole argument. Figures vary by category and study; treat them as ranges, not decimals.
Binet & Field · IPA
Roughly sixty / forty.
Analysis of the IPA effectiveness databank points to a long-run optimum near 60% brand, 40% activation. The market drifted the other way.Read it at the IPA →
Byron Sharp · How Brands Grow
Growth comes from being thought of.
Brands grow through mental and physical availability across the whole category, not by finding a smaller, better-targeted audience and speaking to it more often.Oxford University Press →
James Hurman · Future Demand
He calls it the performance trap.
Hurman's name for the exact pattern above: the dashboards look strong, growth stalls, and acquisition costs climb anyway. His research puts roughly three quarters of US marketers already hitting diminishing returns on performance spend, and only 5 to 25% of a market ready to buy at any given moment. The rest are the future customers most budgets never address.futuredemand.com →
The through-line
Three routes, one conclusion.
Effectiveness data, category-growth science and demand theory arrive at the same place from different directions: the work that cannot prove itself this quarter is the work that compounds. Protecting it is a decision somebody has to make on purpose.
08The plan

Three disciplines, pointed at one decision

Nothing above is a media opinion. Setting the mix deliberately takes three things working together, and they are the three Intentional works in.

Growth & measurement
What is actually driving growth, the one number the business should steer on, and who owns it. Usually first, because every decision downstream depends on the answer.
Brand & creative
Digital brand transformation and creative strategy: the position a business is genuinely entitled to take, and creative built for every stage of the decision rather than only the last one.
Media
Meta and Google, run against the strategy rather than in place of one. The five percent still needs capturing, and it should be captured well.
The question
If the spend stopped on Friday, how long would the demand keep arriving?
Whatever survives that question is the part of the marketing that compounds. Everything else is rented, and the rent goes up every year.
09Where to start

Start by finding out what you are actually steering on

Before any of this becomes a budget argument, it is worth knowing what the current numbers are really telling you. That is a 45-minute conversation, not a project.

The Marketing Measurement Diagnostic

A structured 45-minute session: how the marketing is measured today, the one number the business should run on, where the current setup is overstating itself, and whether the mix is the real reason the returns will not resolve. You keep the framework either way, and there is nothing else for us to sell you in the room.

Book the diagnostic →
10Common questions

The questions this raises

What is the 95:5 rule in marketing?
The 95:5 rule, associated with the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, holds that at any given moment roughly 95% of buyers in a category are not in the market to buy, and only about 5% are. Performance marketing is built to capture the 5%. The other 95% will eventually buy from somebody, and that preference is formed long before they are ready.
What is the Chet Holmes buyers pyramid?
In The Ultimate Sales Machine, Chet Holmes describes any market as sorting into five groups: about 3% buying now, 7% open to it, 30% not thinking about it, 30% who believe they are not interested, and 30% who know they are not interested. Only the top 10% is reachable by a campaign built to convert.
How much of my marketing budget should go to brand versus performance?
Analysis of the IPA effectiveness databank by Binet and Field points to a long-run optimum near 60% brand and 40% performance. The market has drifted the other way, to roughly two-thirds performance. Figures vary by category and growth stage, so treat them as ranges rather than fixed targets.
Why can't I prove the ROI of my marketing?
Usually because the budget was concentrated in the trackable, lower-funnel half, which is also the half attribution most overstates. Each quarter the attributable half defends itself easily while the compounding half cannot produce a number, so it gets trimmed. The budget reshapes itself around whatever is easiest to prove.
What is the difference between current demand and future demand?
James Hurman's Future Demand frames capturing demand that exists today as a different job to building the demand a business will need next year. Most budgets fund the first and assume the second happens on its own.