Here’s a number that should keep every building products marketer up at night: $1.85.
That’s how much Boston Consulting Group found it costs to regain every dollar you save by cutting brand investment.
Read that again. When you slash brand marketing to pump more into lead gen and performance campaigns, you’re not saving money, you’re borrowing from your future at an 85% interest rate.
And yet, across the building products industry, that’s exactly what most companies are doing.
If you’re a marketing leader in the building products category you’re probably under enormous pressure to prove ROI on every marketing dollar. This is not uncommon. We hear about this pressure from our clients in the space That pressure inevitably pushes budgets toward performance marketing and away from brand building. . But the research says that’s backwards. And it’s costing you pipeline, market share, and pricing power you may not even realize you’re losing.
is your brand putting in the work?
The LinkedIn B2B Institute, in partnership with the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, has quantified something building products marketers intuitively know but rarely act on:
At any given moment, only 5%of your potential buyers are actively in the market.
This is the 95-5 Rule. And in the building products industry, where purchase cycles are measured in years rather than months, the percentage of buyers in-market at any moment is likely even smaller.
Think about your own products. Contractors don’t replace trusted suppliers on a whim. Architects don’t re-specify materials for every project. Property managers aren’t constantly shopping for new HVAC systems. Homeowners aren’t browsing siding options every weekend.
Here’s what that means for your marketing: The 95% of potential customers who aren’t buying today are completely invisible to your performance marketing. Your paid search, your retargeting, your lead gen campaigns, they’re all fighting over that same tiny 5% of in-market buyers. Meanwhile, your competitors who invested in brand building years ago already own the consideration set for the other 95%.
The Day-1 Shortlist and why you need to be on it
This is where the research gets uncomfortable.
A survey of over 4,000 B2B buyers found that 95% of B2B purchases go to a vendor who was on the buyer’s Day-1 shortlist—the mental list of potential vendors that exists before any formal evaluation begins.
Even more striking: 94% of buying groups had already ranked their preferred vendors in order before contacting any sales rep. And 77% of the time, they purchased from whichever vendor topped that ranking.
Let that sink in. By the time a contractor, architect, or facility manager fills out a form on your website or responds to your sales team’s outreach, they’ve almost certainly already decided who they want to buy from.
Your sales team isn’t convincing prospects, they’re validating decisions that were made months or years earlier, when the buyer wasn’t even looking, based on which brands had built mental availability over time.
Bain & Company found that 80-90% of B2B buyers have their shortlist set before they do any research.
If your brand isn’t already in their heads when they come into market, you’re not on the shortlist. And if you’re not on the shortlist, performance marketing won’t save you.
Brand MARKETING IS THE FORCE MULTIPLIER
WARC’s 2025 report “The Multiplier Effect,” developed with Analytic Partners, BERA.ai, Prophet, and System1, provides the most comprehensive evidence yet for why brand and performance marketing can’t be treated as separate line items.
The central finding: The relationship between brand and performance isn’t additive, it’s multiplicative. Brand × Performance, not Brand + Performance.
The numbers are hard to ignore:
- 90% ROI increase: Switching from performance-only to an integrated brand-performance approach boosts revenue returns by 25% to 100%, with a median uplift of 90%.
- 40% performance penalty: Companies that shift to performance-only advertising see a 40% decrease in ROI—the “performance penalty.”
- 30% of search clicks are actually driven by other marketing: Your attribution models are systematically overcrediting search and undercrediting the brand activity that created the demand.
Here’s why this matters for building products specifically: Your performance marketing only works on people who already know you exist and have some reason to consider you. Without brand investment, you’re paying premium prices to convert an audience that gets progressively colder and more expensive to reach. That’s the “doom loop” WARC identifies, chasing misleading metrics, cutting brand investment, seeing declining returns, and cutting further.
the budget split research Recommends
Les Binet and Peter Field’s research with LinkedIn found that B2B’s optimal split is closer to 46% brand / 54% performance, reflecting B2B’s somewhat more rational purchase process.
But here’s the gap: 6sense’s 2025 Science of B2B Marketing Spend Report found that real-world B2B allocation runs approximately 30% brand / 70% performance, nearly the inverse of what effectiveness research recommends.
Teams facing budget cuts skew even further, allocating just 20% to brand and 80% to demand generation.
The building products industry, with its long sales cycles, complex buying committees, and technical specification processes, is almost certainly worse than average. When every marketing conversation defaults to “how many MQLs did we get this month,” brand investment inevitably loses.
Case Study: How James Hardie Went from 7% to 28% Market Share
James Hardie, the global leader in fiber cement siding and building materials, offers a compelling case study for building products marketers.
In the late 1990s, James Hardie had a revolutionary product but stagnant sales. Like most tech-driven building products companies, their marketing focused on technical specifications and features. Sound familiar?
Inspired by Intel’s “Intel Inside” campaign and DuPont’s Corian branding, James Hardie made a counterintuitive decision: they launched a consumer branding campaign designed to create emotional resonance, not just convey technical superiority. They bet that B2C marketing could influence B2B sales.
The results were stunning. According to MarketingSherpa:
- Only 7% of builders chose James Hardie over entrenched competitors like Alcoa and Georgia-Pacific
- Four years later, James Hardie had the largest market share at 28%
- Their ads ranked as the third most effective in tracking studies, trailing only Dodge and Land Rover
Today, James Hardie products are installed on more than 8 million homes in North America, and the company generates nearly $4 billion in annual revenue. They’ve become a premium brand that commands premium pricing, something their specs-focused approach never achieved.
Case Study: What Happens When placing a big Bet on Brand
If James Hardie shows what’s possible in building products, ServiceNow, the $178 billion enterprise software company, demonstrates the brand vs. performance shift in real-time B2B tech.
When CMO Colin Fleming joined in 2024, he inherited the standard B2B playbook: heavy lead generation spend, an army of MQLs, and a pipeline that looked healthy on paper. His diagnosis? “We never had a lead problem. Actually, we never had a pipeline problem. It was just the conversion of that pipeline.”
His solution was radical for enterprise tech:
- Slashed lead generation spend by 63%
- Rebalanced to a 50/50 brand-demand budget split, almost unheard of in B2B tech
- Killed the MQL model entirely, pivoting to buying group orchestration
- Cut content by 50%, vendors by 63%, and campaigns from 200 to just 6
The results within three months: 133% increase in conversion rates. The pipeline was smaller, but “smarter and richer”, with stronger revenue growth. Engagement rose 66%.
Fleming explicitly credited the Binet and Field research as his playbook. And his reasoning resonates directly with the building products challenge: “RFP shortlists have shrunk from seven or eight vendors to just three. If you’re not already in the buyer’s mind before they start the process, you’re not getting on that list.”
LinkedIn’s own data from the ServiceNow campaign reinforces this: demand campaigns that were warmed by prior brand exposure saw a 69% improvement in conversion rates, a 50% lift in engagement, and a 27% decrease in cost-per-click.
The lesson for building products marketers: even at the highest levels of enterprise B2B, the companies seeing breakthrough results are those willing to shift budget from lead generation to brand investment, and measure success over quarters, not weeks.
The Case for Emotion in B2B
Perhaps the most counterintuitive finding from Binet and Field’s research: Emotional B2B campaigns are 7x more effective at driving long-term sales, profits, and revenue than rational messaging.
Yes, even in B2B. Yes, even in building products.
Here’s why: You don’t sell to businesses. You sell to people who work at businesses. And when those people walk into the office, they don’t suddenly become emotionless robots. In fact, the stakes in B2B decisions often make emotional factors more important, such as fear of making the wrong choice, desire for professional recognition, anxiety about budget decisions that could affect their careers.
For building products companies, this means your content marketing, trade show presence, and advertising shouldn’t just focus on technical specifications and competitive features. Those rational messages have their place, primarily in activation campaigns targeting in-market buyers. But your brand building should tap into the emotional drivers that actually influence decision-making: trust, confidence, fear of failure, professional pride.
A Framework for Action
The research points to clear strategic imperatives:
- Reframe brand as future-pipeline investment. The brand that gets remembered is the brand that gets bought. Brand spending isn’t a cost center, it’s the mechanism that ensures future buyers consider you when they enter the market. In other words, it’s pipeline insurance.
- Audit your budget split. If you’re spending less than 40% on brand building, you’re probably underinvesting. The research suggests 46% is optimal for B2B, with premium and market-leading brands investing even more. Where does your company fall?
- Watch the “search ceiling.” WARC’s research recommends that search spending shouldn’t exceed 25% of total advertising budgets. If your digital marketing is heavily skewed toward paid search, you may be capturing demand that was created elsewhere, and underinvesting in creating new demand.
- Embrace emotion. This doesn’t mean dramatic, tear-jerking content, but thel drivers that influence business decisions: hope, aspiration, confidence, and fear of failure. Trust. Peace of mind. Professional pride.
- Measure over appropriate time horizons. Only 4% of B2B marketers measure campaign impact beyond 6 months, despite sales cycles averaging 10-11 months and brand effects taking approximately 6 months to materialize. Short-term measurement systematically undervalues brand investment and biases your optimization toward lead gen.
The Bottom Line
The distinction between “brand” and “performance” marketing shouldn’t be thought of as competing because, together, they compound.
Strong brand equity makes your performance marketing more efficient. Well-designed performance tactics can reinforce brand associations. The companies winning in building products understand this, they’ve stopped treating brand and performance as separate budget buckets and started treating them as a unified growth system.
In a world where 95% of your potential customers aren’t buying today, the brands that invest in being remembered tomorrow will capture the market when those buyers finally enter it.
The question isn’t whether you can afford to invest in brand building. It’s whether you can afford not to.