Your brand has a memory problem

Most purchases don't start with an ad or Google search. They start with a memory.

I spent nearly a decade at J.P. Morgan — Doing everything from building multimillion-dollar, global campaigns and managing sales enablement functions across some of the most complex B2B categories out there. And one thing I saw over and over again: Teams pouring budget into performance marketing while the brand quietly faded from buyers' minds.

The research backs this up. Professor Jenni Romaniuk at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute calls them Category Entry Points — the cues that trigger brand recall when a buyer enters a purchasing situation. Her findings are clear:

The more buying situations your brand is linked to in memory, the more likely you are to be considered, chosen and retained.

Here's what that means in practice: The majority of your potential buyers aren't in market right now. They're not searching, not comparing, not ready to talk to sales. But they are forming impressions.

The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute calls this the 95-5 rule — at any given moment, 95% of your potential buyers simply aren't ready to buy.

And when the moment does come — a product launch, a leadership shift, a budget unlock — the brands that get remembered are the ones that get bought. In fact, Harvard Business Review shows us that 90% of buyers will ultimately choose a vendor from the day one list.

The reality: Most marketing is built entirely for the moment of purchase (especially in B2B, but I see this in B2C too). Product-focused "reasons to believe" and brag points, demos, lead gen forms. All useful. But if your brand isn't already living in memory before that moment hits, you're starting from zero every single time.

The story has to come before the campaign.

That's what I built Arc to help companies do — get the narrative right so that when your buyer's moment arrives, your brand is already there. What's one buying situation your brand should own in your customers' minds — but probably doesn't?

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