❤️ The 95% Problem & Emotional Branding
The uncomfortable 95% truth about consumer behaviour – why your ROAS has an emotional problem. Plus: Three questions to guide your next strategic marketing decisions.
Hi 👋 I’m Florian Schleicher. This is the FutureStrategies newsletter. Thank you so much for reading along 💚
For many years, I have been fascinated by one question:
How do people choose a brand without really knowing why?
Not out of habit. Not because of the price. Not because of the latest campaign.
But because something, at some point, created a connection.
Long before the moment of purchase arrived.
“Brand is an emotional association.”
Scott Galloway
That is the power of branding.
Like a sea of lights, a strong brand guides us through decision-making processes.
But this power is currently being systematically underestimated.
This is because many marketing strategies are based on the assumption that people take in information, process it and then make a decision. Rationally. Consciously. Logically.
Science tells a different story:
🧠 The brain doesn’t buy what you think
Gerald Zaltman, a marketing researcher at Harvard Business School has, after years of research, published a figure that captures this:
95% of all purchasing decisions are made subconsciously.
Not just sometimes. But systematically.
This means that if your brand relies solely on rational communication, you will reach at most 5% of the factors influencing your target audience’s decision-making. The remaining 95% are determined elsewhere, before your campaign is even seen.
Our brain has already made a decision before our conscious mind even begins to gather arguments.
What this means for your marketing is radical:
Every cent you invest in rational persuasion – that is, in features, comparisons and justifications – is fighting against a resistance that is biologically ingrained.
And there is a second 95% problem.
At any given point in time up to 95% of your potential buyers are simply not in your market. They aren’t buying because they don’t need anything right now, not because your campaign isn’t reaching them.
And you can’t force them into the market by persuasion.
Performance marketing is tasked with converting that 5% who are currently ready to buy. This is both sensible and necessary for every brand.
What determines which brand is chosen at the moment of purchase? Which brand pops into their mind first. Which brand has left an emotional connection long before the purchase decision became a reality.
You don’t build that with a performance budget.
❤️ Brand and Performance
Brand marketing has a reputation for being a bit of a soft touch: pretty pictures. Emotional stories. Hard to measure.
On the other hand, performance marketing is all about metrics, statistics, ROAS, CPL, attribution. Clear accountability.
A few weeks ago, I put this question to the test on LinkedIn and asked which of the two functions was “more important”: 48 marketing professionals voted and discussed the issue.
The results show that the marketing world is divided:
I am a brand marketing strategist. I believe in the power of brand storytelling.
And in long-term power, in trust that builds quietly until people choose you without knowing why. I believe in building, not renting. I believe in demand creation rather than just demand capture.
But I also understand the performance arguments:
