The Hunter-Gatherer Gap

The bee colony is the textbook example of the trade-off between working what you have and looking for what’s next. Ad guru Rory Sutherland often references the work by Viswanathan (Nature 1999) on Lévy-flight search and Seeley on honey-bee scout / recruit ratios. Both find that healthy colonies keep a steady minority of scouts at all times — the share doesn’t rise and fall with the season. March (1991) showed the same logic for organisations: a company that puts everything into working what it has hits the best version of where it is, and can’t find anywhere better. The cost of scouting is the cost of knowing where the next field is before the current one runs out.

The pattern is consistent across UK B2B channel-mix surveys: digital channels take most of the marketing budget because they are measurable, defensible, and reliable. They are the gatherer’s mix and they belong there. The exposure is that the whole budget sits on channels owned and run by middlemen (Google, Meta, LinkedIn) whose interests are moving away from yours. When the channel changes shape — as AI Overviews and answer engines are doing now — a 100% gather budget has nowhere to go. The steady minority allocation to hunting is the position the colony has held for thirty million years; the marketing equivalent has been a footnote in budgets for the past five.

The maths on the gatherer’s mix has flipped over the past two years. BrightEdge data shows that 91% of B2B information searches now trigger an AI Overview — the answer appears at the top of the page and the reader leaves before reaching any website. HubSpot, the largest B2B content-marketing publisher in the world, has reported around a 70% drop in organic traffic to its hosted sites between 2024 and 2025. UK B2B paid acquisition costs have been climbing 24-29% year on year, as more competitors bid for less attention on Google and LinkedIn. The result: every pound spent on the gatherer’s mix buys less than it did two years ago. And per the 95:5 rule from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, the 95% of B2B buyers who aren’t actively in market never see those ads in the first place — they build their shortlist from the businesses that come to them.

A named letter, a personal email or a phone call all take effort the recipient can see: a real address, a real name, a real timing decision. That effort says “we chose you” — what Spence (Nobel, 2001) called a costly signal. A banner ad says the opposite: that the advertiser bought a slot on a list of people who fit a profile. The Direct Marketing Association’s UK response benchmarks show the gap on like-for-like methods: direct mail at 4.4%, email at 0.12%, display advertising at 0.04%. Direct mail in particular keeps around a 90% open rate — envelopes get opened in a way banner impressions never get viewed. The numbers get sharper still when you can choose exactly which named decision-maker you reach.

Pfeffer & Sutton (2000) called this the knowing-doing gap: companies regularly know what they should do and fail to do it, not because the diagnosis is unclear but because acting means changing a budget, changing a reporting line, or starting a conversation no-one wants to start. The IPA / FT Board-Brand Rift study found that 83% of UK business leaders believe marketing contributes to the bottom line — but more than half rate their own knowledge of brand-building as average or poor. The board votes on gut feel because nothing else is in front of them. The marketing professional’s job in the next budget conversation isn’t to win an argument against people who disagree — it’s to put the words in front of people who already half-agree but have nothing on paper.

The multi-channel boost is one of the most-repeated findings in B2B marketing research. Martal Group’s 2025 B2B Direct Marketing analysis — pulling together studies across the UK and US — finds that companies using seven or more marketing channels are 72% more likely to grow market share than those using fewer. When direct mail runs alongside digital retargeting, response rates lift by 63% and leads by 53% compared to digital-only baselines. Bain & Co’s separate channel-mix work reaches the same conclusion by different methods: adding a new channel boosts the channels you’re already running, not just its own number. The hunter’s allocation is the channel most B2B marketing teams have left out of the mix — not because they don’t believe in it, but because no-one has put the line item on the budget paper.

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