Awareness and B2B buying
What are in-market and out-of-market buyers?
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what it means here
Here is what the term means for a UK buyer
The definition above holds anywhere. Buying media in the UK adds the detail below, including where AdBuyMCP does something different.
Professor John Dawes of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute estimates that something like 5% of business buyers are in the market in a given quarter, a rule of thumb that varies by category. That is the 95-5 rule: at any one time, most of the companies that could buy from you are not looking. Search ads, LinkedIn lead gen, outbound and intent data compete for the in-market few, and they are the right tools for them. Awareness advertising is for the rest: it aims to make your name familiar before those companies start looking. An AdBuyMCP awareness plan does that second job, beside the first.
Where does the 95-5 rule come from?
Professor John Dawes of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute published it with LinkedIn's B2B Institute in May 2021 (checked 20 October 2026). He starts from how rarely companies change suppliers such as their main bank or law firm, and works out from that how few are in the market in any one quarter.
He calls it a heuristic rather than a precise rule. A category bought more often has more of its buyers in the market each quarter, so work out your own category's buying cycle before you lean on the figure.
What should a B2B company do about out-of-market buyers?
Keep the tools that reach buyers who are looking, and add something that reaches the rest before they look. Dawes puts the reasoning in one sentence: “To grow a brand, you need to advertise to people who aren't in the market now, so that when they do enter the market your brand is one they are familiar with.”
For a B2B startup that usually means advertising where buyers spend time away from their inbox: on the way to work, at home in the evening, in the podcasts they choose and under ChatGPT's answers when they ask about a problem. An AdBuyMCP awareness plan runs on out-of-home, streaming TV, podcasts and ChatGPT ads at 3, 5 or 12 times a week, and the weekly report shows what each channel delivered against the plan.
Source: Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, Advertising effectiveness and the 95-5 rule (Professor John Dawes), May 2021, checked 20 October 2026.
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related terms
These terms sit next to this one
Most confusion in media buying comes from two adjacent terms being used interchangeably, so these are the neighbours worth reading next.
Day-one shortlist
The vendors a business buyer already has in mind when a purchase begins, before any searching, comparing or talking to sellers. Studies of B2B buying find that most purchases go to a vendor on that list, so much of a vendor's chance is settled before the formal process starts.
Frequency
The average number of times the people in an audience see an advert in a period, usually a week or a whole campaign. It is impressions divided by the people reached, so it describes the audience on average and says nothing certain about any one person.
Share of voice
A brand's advertising presence expressed as a proportion of all advertising in its category, in a given market and period. Used as a planning benchmark on the argument that share of voice above share of market tends to precede growth.
Retargeting
Showing advertising to people who have already interacted with a brand: visited a site, abandoned a basket, opened an email. Depends on being able to recognise the same person again on a later occasion.
same group
These terms are also in Awareness and B2B buying
How B2B buyers choose vendors, and the words for planning how often your market sees you and how big that market is.