95% of your customers aren’t buying today – so change to a brand building marketing mindset

Here’s a sobering fact for anyone in the automotive or other technical B2B industries: 95% of your potential customers aren’t ready to buy from you right now. Not today, not this week, and probably not this quarter either.

That’s not a number I made up – it comes from the clever people at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science and has been championed by leading professional marketers and academics (like Les Binet and Peter Field). If you’re in B2B, this is gold dust. It means your pipeline isn’t dry because your sales team is lazy. It’s dry because most of your customers aren’t in the market yet.

And yet… what do most automotive and technical companies do? Double down on lead generation. “We need more leads!” “Run another email campaign!” “Get me a spec sheet on the website!”

If 95% of your customers aren’t ready to buy, relying only on lead generation is like planting seeds and expecting a harvest tomorrow.
Sure, you might find a ripe fruit that fell off someone else’s tree, but the real growth comes from nurturing your own orchard over time.

Brand Building Is Your Secret Weapon

This is where brand building comes in. And no, I don’t mean just a shiny logo or a tagline that someone’s nephew wrote in five minutes. I mean real brand strategy: the stuff that gives your company a voice, a personality, and crucially, mental availability.

Mental availability? Fancy marketing term for this: when your customer finally is ready to buy, you’re the first name that pops into their head. That doesn’t happen by bombarding them with product specs. It happens through long term, consistent brand building.

In B2B automotive or defence markets, brand building and activation (aka lead generation) work hand in hand. Activation gets short-term results; brand building pays you back with compound interest. Without brand, you’re just another company waving a spec sheet, hoping someone notices.

Spec Sheets Don’t Sell, Emotions Do

I can hear the engineers groaning already: “But our product is technically superior! Look at our torque curves!” And yes, specs matter, but they’re table stakes. Everyone has performance metrics. Everyone has ISO certifications. Everyone has ‘innovative solutions.’

Here’s what actually tips the scales: emotion. Yes, even in B2B. Especially in B2B. Humans make decisions first with emotion and then justify them with logic. If you think the procurement manager is sitting there with a spreadsheet making a purely rational decision, you’ve clearly never sat in on a board meeting.

Strong brands signal trust, reduce perceived risk, and create preference. That’s why defence contracts go to companies with heritage and credibility, and why automotive OEMs stick with partners they know, even if a competitor is 2% cheaper.

Stop Acting Like Marketing Is Just Fluff

Too many business owners and technical leaders see marketing as the ‘colouring-in department’ or the guys that “do brochures.” They’ll happily spend millions on R&D but choke at the idea of investing in brand. And then they wonder why their marketing team isn’t ‘delivering the leads’

If you want long-term growth, you need a balanced strategy:

Brand building for salience and mental availability.
Activation for those 5% who are ready to buy now.

Ignore brand, and you’re just shouting into the void. Invest in brand, and you’ll own the conversation when the 95% finally move into market.

Why Brand Building Beats the Short-Term Fix

Take a look at these charts. They tell a story most businesses ignore.

Short term sales activation (those quick-hit campaigns to grab leads) delivers temporary spikes, but look what happens next – the impact falls off a cliff the moment you stop spending. It’s like a sugar rush. Great for a quick boost, useless for long term health.

Brand building works differently. It compounds. Every investment you make in salience, mental availability, and emotional connection adds another layer of growth. Over time, your base sales level rises and suddenly, every activation campaign you run becomes more effective because people already know (and trust) your brand.

Research shows the sweet spot for B2B brands is roughly a 60:40 split in favour of brand. Why? Because strong brands don’t just drive preference – they make you harder to ignore and easier to buy when the 95% finally hit the market.

So if you’re still treating brand as an afterthought, ask yourself this: do you want a spike, or do you want a staircase?

Here’s My Take

I’ve worked with automotive and defence companies across the globe, and I’ve seen this pattern repeat: The brands that play the long game, building awareness, trust, and preference, are the ones still standing when the market gets tough. The ones who rely on short-term lead gen? They’re usually the ones calling me in a panic six months later.

So, next time someone in your business says, “We don’t need brand, just leads,” feel free to smile politely and send them this post. Or better yet, give me a call, and I’ll explain why ignoring brand is the most expensive decision you’ll ever make.

Because in B2B, the future belongs to the brands that customers remember, not the ones that screamed the loudest for an RFP last quarter.

Ready to create a powerful brand?

If you’re serious about long term growth in the automotive, defence, or heavy equipment sectors, you need more than a few lead-gen campaigns – you need a strategy that builds brand and drives sales.

At CMB, we help technical and B2B brands do exactly that: create positioning, messaging, and marketing strategies that make you the first name in your customer’s mind when it matters most.