Kohan Carruthers-Taylor

Why Growth Can Hit a Ceiling, and how fuelling future demand unlocks the next phase of growth

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It’s our fault. As an industry, we’ve built a trap… and many businesses are now stuck inside it.

We’ve moved from an era where data was scarce and difficult to access, to one where we’re completely overwhelmed by it. Measurement was rightly designed to make marketing more accountable and effective. Instead, in the pursuit of certainty, it has quietly narrowed how growth is defined and potentially limited how far businesses can scale.

What started as optimisation has become the sole focus.

The Performance Paradox

Over the last few years, I’ve seen a recurring trend: clients across the board, but especially in finance, attempting to tie every single penny back to direct conversion. I’ve even been asked to forecast a Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) for OOH and sponsorships.

When ROI dips or conversions slow down, the instinct is to double down on bottom-of-the-funnel activity. On paper, this feels logical. In reality, it often creates a “Performance Growth Ceiling.”

Instead of unlocking scale, businesses begin to see:

  • Rapidly increasing CPAs as the immediately available market is exhausted
  • Lower-quality or irrelevant traffic being forced through the funnel
  • Declining ROI – the exact opposite of the original goal!

The 95:5 Rule

To break through this ceiling, we have to distinguish between Current Demand and Future Demand.

Current Demand (5%): These are the people actively researching or ready to buy right now.
Future Demand (95%): These are the people who aren’t in the market today but will be in months or years.

Brand activity isn’t just about awareness or other metrics, it’s about fuelling future demand. This means building familiarity and mental availability long before a buying decision is triggered. This simplified way to reframe brand activity highlights to key stakeholders why the long-term matters.

Especially in B2B or high-consideration sectors, 95% of your target market is currently “out-of-market.” They are living their lives, not searching for your category, and therefore not thinking about your competitors.

Moving Beyond the “Race to the Bottom”

If you solely increase performance budgets, you are fighting a war over that 5% sliver of the pie. Without building mental availability (the likelihood of a brand coming to mind in a buying situation) you are entering a race to the bottom against every competitor chasing the same leads and effectively increasing the cost to win on your own brand terms in bottom of the funnel channels.

It’s important to note that brand activity can still deliver short-term wins, however its real power lies in priming the 95%. By the time those customers move into the 5%, you should already have mental real estate.

If you only harvest what’s ripe today, you eventually starve. Growth strategies should be treated like ecosystems, not extraction tools.

True growth isn’t found by just squeezing the last drop out of the 5% who are ready to buy; it’s found by nurturing and winning amongst the 95% who haven’t even started looking yet.

If this is done right, you can fund the future and watch the ceiling disappear.