Awareness works. I am not going to argue with the Ehrenberg-Bass position on how advertising builds memory, because the mechanism is real and the evidence behind it is better than most of what gets cited in marketing.
The problem is that “build awareness” is not a goal, because a goal is something you can fail.
So try this before you approve anything. Name the month in which you would admit the awareness campaign had not worked, and name the number you would look at to decide. Say both out loud.
Almost nobody can, and that is the whole issue. Awareness among a group you can name is a sellable objective with a budget and a review date. Awareness in general is a line item with no owner, which is why it survives bad quarters that would have killed a campaign with a target on it.
The statistic in the deck, read properly
You are going to be shown the 95-5 rule, so it is worth knowing where it comes from, because the source is genuinely good and the way it gets used is not.
It comes from Professor John Dawes at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, in a 2021 report written for LinkedIn’s B2B Institute. The claim is that at any given moment most business buyers are not in the market, so advertising mainly works by building memory links that activate later, when they are.
Now the part nobody quotes. Ehrenberg-Bass’s own write-up gives the arithmetic behind the number: companies switch providers for things like banking, legal advice, software or telecoms roughly every five years, which implies about 20% of them are in the market in a given year, and about 5% in a given quarter.
Read that again, because two things fall out of it.
The famous number is a quarterly figure. Run the same arithmetic over a year and you get 80-20, which is a completely different strategic picture and which I have never once seen on a slide. Whoever is quoting 95-5 at you should be able to say which window they mean, and if they cannot, they have not read the thing they are citing.
And the ratio is downstream of your purchase cycle, not a law of nature. Five years between purchases produces that split. A category people buy every year, or every quarter, produces something nothing like it. Quoting a figure derived from corporate banking relationships at a business whose customers reorder every six weeks is importing somebody else’s arithmetic.
The published wording is also “up to 95%”, offered as a heuristic rather than a measurement. The paper is honest about that. The deck usually is not.
None of which makes the mechanism wrong. It makes the statistic a reason to do a specific thing for a specific category, rather than a license for undifferentiated spend.
It does not scale down the way a lead campaign does
Here is the structural reason awareness is hard at small-business size, and it has nothing to do with whether brand matters.
The mechanism needs reach and repetition. Memory links get built by being seen more than once by the same person, which means the spend has a minimum effective dose, and below that dose you do not get a smaller result. You get no result and no information either, which is the same trap I described when the honest budget number comes out bigger than you can fund.
A lead campaign fails differently, and more usefully. Half the budget buys you roughly half the leads and tells you what a lead costs. Half an awareness budget buys you a slightly larger number of people who still cannot remember your name.
That asymmetry is the actual argument. Not that brand is soft, but that it is the one kind of spend where going in at a quarter strength is indistinguishable from not going in.
The version that works at your size is depth
So narrow the audience until the budget can afford repetition inside it.
Not a demographic. A group you could write down: forty named accounts, the plant engineers at every manufacturer within two hours of you, the three postal codes your crews actually serve, the membership list of one trade association.
Once the group is a list, the budget stops being a percentage of revenue and becomes a cost per person per month, which is a number you can argue about sensibly. Five hundred people who matter, reached eight times, will do more for you than fifty thousand strangers reached once, and it costs less.
This also gives you the failure condition you could not name earlier. If you have spent six months putting your name in front of the same four hundred people and none of them recognize it when you call, that is a result. A bad one, but a real one, and you can act on it.
Three proxies, and what is wrong with each
You cannot measure awareness properly without a baseline survey, which costs real money and which almost no small business runs. Worth saying plainly: if nobody is going to commission one, stop pretending the campaign will be evaluated.
What you can watch instead are three correlates, each with a defect you should know about.
Branded search volume. The best of the three, because somebody typing your name is demonstrating memory. The defect is that it moves with your own activity and with seasonality, so compare it year over year rather than month over month, and discount any lift that coincides with a campaign that also drove direct response.
Direct and unattributed traffic. Useful in aggregate. The defect is that this bucket is also where measurement failure goes, so it grows when your tracking breaks, which means a rising line is ambiguous in the worst way.
How often a prospect names you unprompted on a first call. Count it in a spreadsheet, free, starting today. The defect is obvious: it samples only people who already called you, so it runs high. But it is the only one of the three with a human in it, and a shift from one in ten to four in ten over a year is the most convincing evidence you are likely to get.
None of these is awareness. They are things that move when awareness moves, which is a weaker claim and the honest one. I set out the numbers I would actually hold a marketing budget to in the four that can deliver bad news, and all three of these sit below them.
The version I would sign off on
Brand work is not the enemy here and I would not want to be read as saying it is. Plenty of small companies have no position worth remembering, and no amount of lead generation fixes that.
What I would refuse is the undefined version. So: a named group, a cost per person per month, a review date in the calendar, and one sentence written in advance saying what result would make you stop.
If you cannot write that sentence, the honest move is to put the money into the thing that has a decision rule attached, and come back to brand when you can define the audience narrowly enough to afford being memorable to it.
That is not a verdict on awareness. It is a verdict on managing something you have chosen not to measure.
If you’d like help working out whether your awareness spend has a group and a review date behind it, drop me a line on email, WhatsApp, phone or LinkedIn and we can have a quick chat, and my notes on how I work cover the rest. I’m taking on a small number of contracts at the moment, so I’ll tell you straight whether it’s something I could help with.