The phrase “growth marketing” gets thrown around like everyone agrees on what it means. They don’t.
So let’s be clear about the house view. Growth marketing is a data-driven, experimentation-led approach to acquiring, activating, retaining, and monetising customers across the full funnel. At its core, it’s a discipline involving continuous test-and-learn cycles aimed at finding scalable, compounding ways to grow rather than a single channel or a one-off campaign.
The practitioners’ shorthand for the lifecycle is AARRR: acquisition, activation, retention, referral, revenue. Ugly acronym, useful idea. The pirate framework… “aarrr.” It forces you to look past the top of the funnel and ask what happens after someone arrives — whether they activate, whether they stick, whether they tell anyone, and whether any of it turns into money.
What sets growth marketing apart from “marketing” in the general sense is the rigour. Rapid iteration. Tight measurement. A willingness to optimise the whole customer lifecycle rather than just the bit that’s easiest to count. Done well, it bridges marketing, sales, and customer success, and treats every stage as something you can test and improve.
That’s the method. The more interesting question is where it sits in the bigger strategic picture — and that’s where many teams get it wrong.
Where Growth Marketing Sits in the Brand vs Demand Conversation
The real strategic frame isn’t growth marketing. It’s brand versus demand. Growth marketing is largely a method that operates inside that frame.
Brand marketing builds long-term mental availability — making buyers aware of you and predisposed towards you before they’re in-market. Its effects are diffuse, slow-building, and genuinely hard to attribute. Demand generation, or “activation”, captures and converts the buyers who are in-market now. It’s highly measurable, which is precisely why finance loves it.
Les Binet and Peter Field’s work suggests roughly a 60/40 split — brand to activation — for optimal long-term growth in many B2B categories. The exact ratio varies by category and stage, so don’t treat it as gospel. But the direction of travel is clear: most B2B teams under-invest in brand and over-invest in capturing demand that already exists.
Here’s the catch for growth marketing specifically. As it’s practised, it has historically lived much closer to the demand and activation end. Its bias towards measurability, attribution, and short feedback loops makes it a natural fit for performance and conversion work. You can A/B test a landing page in a week. You can’t A/B test something that builds a brand’s awareness and trust in a week, let alone measure it.
So the risk is that “growth” quietly becomes a synonym for short-term demand capture, and the brand-building that feeds the pipeline in the first place gets neglected. The pipeline looks healthy right up until it doesn’t.
The more mature reading is that growth marketing is a discipline — experimentation and optimisation — that should be applied to both brand and demand. Even though brand experiments are harder to measure and slower to read, that doesn’t make them less worth running. It just makes them harder.
How the 95/5 Rule Fits
If you’ve spent any time on LinkedIn, you’ve met the 95/5 rule. It comes from the LinkedIn B2B Institute and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, with John Dawes doing much of the underlying work.
The claim is simple. At any given moment, only about 5% of business buyers are actively in-market. The other 95% are out-of-market and won’t buy for months, or years. The numbers aren’t precise — depending on the category it might be 90/10 — but the principle holds, and it reframes the brand-versus-demand debate sharply.
Demand generation and most classic growth-marketing tactics target the 5%. Buyers ready to act now. This is necessary work, but it’s a small, heavily contested pool, and it does nothing to influence the much larger future pipeline. Everyone is fishing in the same small pond, bidding up the same keywords, chasing the same in-market accounts.
Brand marketing targets the 95%. It builds the memory structures and associations so that when an out-of-market buyer eventually does enter the market, you’re already in their consideration set. Because B2B buying cycles are long and involve multiple stakeholders, most of the long-term value of marketing accrues right here — to the buyers who aren’t ready yet.
For growth marketing, the 95/5 rule is a useful corrective. A pure experimentation-and-attribution mindset gravitates towards the 5%, because that’s where results show up quickly and cleanly. It’s where the dashboards light up. The rule argues that sustainable growth depends heavily on the 95% — which is exactly the work that’s hardest to test and slowest to prove.
So the strategic implication isn’t “stop measuring”. It’s this: keep the experimentation rigour, but point a meaningful share of it — and the budget — at brand-building aimed at future buyers. Accept that the measurement will be longer and fuzzier. Do it anyway.
We know how that lands with a CEO who needs marketing to justify itself this quarter. It’s the last thing they want to hear. But it’s a bit like exercise or eating right — you do things today that pay off for your future self. Building tomorrow’s pipeline with the 95% is exactly that kind of work.
Putting It Together
It’s worth holding the three ideas apart, because they answer different questions.
Growth marketing is the how — data-led experimentation across the full lifecycle.
Brand versus demand is the what and when — long-term mental availability versus short-term conversion, and how you split your effort between them.
The 95/5 rule is the why — the reason you can’t let growth marketing collapse entirely into demand capture. Target only the 5% and you’re optimising a small, expensive, ever-shrinking pool while the 95% who’ll actually fill next year’s pipeline forget you exist.
The teams that get this right don’t pick a side. They apply the discipline of growth marketing — the testing, the measurement, the relentless iteration — across both brand and demand. They run the fast, clean experiments where they can, and they make the slower, fuzzier brand bets too, because that’s where the compounding happens.
For us it was never brand versus demand. It’s brand and demand. Growth marketing is simply the operating system that runs both.
