What you need to know:

• A session with Mark Ritson preceded Jon Lombardo's meeting with Ehrenberg-Bass Institute Professor John Dawes.
• Prof. Dawes mentioned the 95:5 brand-to-demand rule, which stipulates that because 95 per cent of business-to-business (B2B) buyers are out of market at any one time, marketers should concentrate on priming the 95 per cent, and focus sales activity, or activation, on the 5 per cent that are in-market and ready to buy.
• Lombardo was stunned. He'd never heard of the theory and asked Dawes to write a paper backed by data, which he duly did. It became one of the central planks of the Ehrenberg-Bass-produced paper, How B2B Brands Grow.
• "It's been, without question, the thing that has gotten the most traction of anything we've ever done," per Lombardo.
• Lombardo and Peter Weinberg think Australia, via Prof. Ritson and Ehrenberg-Bass, is leading the world in "cutting edge" marketing thinking. 

Australia is leading the world in cutting edge marketing thinking, according to global execs at the US-based B2B Institute.

The LinkedIn-backed think tank hit on its 95:5 rule – which states that business to business marketers should concentrate 95 per cent of budgets on brand and just five per cent on performance – following a session with Mark Ritson, before heading down to Adelaide to meet with the marketing scientists at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. There, a conversation with Institute Professor John Dawes sparked the theory’s development, with the 95:5 rule since gaining more attention than any of the B2B Institute's prior work, according to Jon Lombardo, Global Head of Research at the B2B Institute.

“Peter Weinberg and I took an incredibly long, incredibly terrible flight to Australia. We went out drinking with Mark Ritson and talked a lot about marketing,” said Lombardo.

“I woke up the next morning and flew to Adelaide. I met with a professor named John Dawes in a terribly hungover state. He said, ‘Yes, there's [Binet & Field’s] 60:40 rule. That's one way to think about this [question of brand to demand investment ratios]. But the 95:5 rule is another way to think about it. There's lots of data showing that only 5 per cent of people are in market at any given time, while 95 per cent are out market.’”

While Prof. Dawes shrugged and said “everyone knows that”, Lombardo was stunned.

“I said ‘I didn’t know that. That is an amazing idea, is there any supporting data and could you write it up for us?’. He agreed and I immediate called Peter.” Weinberg said he “dropped everything” and Prof. Dawes delivered the research paper two months later.

“It's been, without question, the thing that has gotten the most traction of anything we've ever done,” said Lombardo. 

“Professor Dawes just hadn't published anything on it, so it was an idea floating around in his head. We are very proud that we were able to help him bring that to market,” added B2B Institute Global Head of Development, Peter Weinberg.

“What I really like about it is that it explains what sales should do, which is focus on the 5 per cent of known customers. It explains what marketing should do, which is focus on the 95 per cent of unknown customers. It explains how finance should think: Here are your current cash flows, the 5 per cent; here are your future cash flows [the 95 per cent]. So it organises almost every part of how you need to think about marketing: how marketing should work with sales; how marketing should work with finance; how good marketing works at the organisational level,” said Weinberg. “It is also customer centric – who's in market and out of market – and it's cash flow centric. It is a unifying theory in some ways, and there are very few ideas like that.”

The two said Australia’s marketing scientists are managing to punch far above their weight on the global stage.

“It seems like it’s always Australia,” said Weinberg. “I think it's just shocking how many of these revolutionary ideas and thinkers happen to be based in Australia,” added Lombardo. “It's not a massive market. America is the biggest advertising market in the world, but the most cutting-edge thinking within marketing right now is coming from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and it's coming from Mark Ritson – who's in Tasmania... But I think we can call that Australia.”