Stand back Pareto Principle, time to meet Ehrenberg-Bass Institute’s 95–5 rule

It’s not about the hard sell it’s about making brand memories and experiences

By Nicola Finn- Executive Director — OggaDoon

We have all got different frameworks and processes in our business lives. I have often used the Pareto Principle, better known as the 80/20 rule. This was born in the early 1900s the Italian economist and keen gardener Vilfredo Pareto noted that 20% of his pea pods contained 80% of the peas. He had also noted that 80% of the land in Italy at that time was owned by 20% of the population.

This principle can be applied in so many ways to business, such as with productivity- 20% of your activities generate 80 % of your results or with customer revenue, where 80% of revenue comes from 20% of your customers. The latter example is great for identifying the importance of customer retention campaigns but what about customer acquisition?

Now, let’s welcome the 95:5 rule from the Ehrenberg-Bass and the LinkedIn B2B institutes that states that at any given time 95% of your target personas/audiences will not be in the market for your product or services and only 5% will be. However, its guidance states not to take a short-term sales-led approach, by focusing energies on that 5%. The strategy should be focused on having a communications program that is taking a longer-term relationship-driven approach, targeting the 95%, ready for when they are ready to buy.

This relationship-driven brand building strategy involves generating a program of messages that create memories in the B2B working lives and sectors of your target audiences. This memory link will be activated when the buyer does come into the market. So advertising and organic impressions, will have accumulated over time, affect our memories, so advertising has to be designed to create distinct impressions about your brand in people’s minds to be activated later.

We have to share a little reminder that brand building goes beyond just logos and colours in your marketing material. In order to define and develop a brand, it is all about embarking on a brand discovery process. We do this by creating a questionnaire, sharing this with key internal and external stakeholders to find out their thoughts regarding the mission, USPs, differentiators and longer-term goals. It is essentially internal and external research from your most valuable assets, your customers and your clients to capture a market-led vision of your organisation. This amongst other factors is then questioned, tested and agreed upon by employee stakeholders. This defines the brand voice and personality and is integrated into your business plan. This ethos forms part of the company backbone and the themes are integrated into cross-functional goals/programs and into all physical and digital customer touchpoints.

If you would like help defining your company brand or developing a program of storytelling to raise awareness of your proposition then please do get in touch.