Aug 18, 2025 | Marketing, Uncategorized
It seems that everyone in marketing now worships at the altar of Lifetime Customer Value. The problem arises when the item is treated as a one off sale, bought only once, or very occasionally.
They pitch it in courses and webinars as the golden ticket to getting rich quick. Cynical, but true?
Forget generating monthly engagement and pushing free trials. If you’re selling homes or high-end cars, your customer isn’t looking to swipe their card again anytime soon. These are one off deals. So where does LCV fit?
Simple: it hides in plain sight.
For big-ticket items, the real lifetime value isn’t in repeat purchases, it’s in reputation. It’s in the willingness of your customers to recommend you. Think of it as latent value embedded in social proof.
That five-star Google review is nice, but what you really want is for that customer to feel like you’ve done such a remarkable job that they must become your apostle. They brag about you at dinner parties. They drop your name into WhatsApp groups. They drag their friends to your showroom. That’s when lifetime value becomes real.
It’s not easy to measure. This isn’t click-tracking or coupon redemption. This is a slower game, built on service excellence, and value delivery service which build trust.
A client of mine employs this strategy. They work their butts off to do a great job, they ask for referrals, ideally those happy customers make the initial introduction, delivering a bag of social proof, then they track the conversions.
It works.
The real game is delivering so far above expectations that your customer feels morally obliged to evangelise. ‘Reciprocity’ is a powerful psychological driver of human behaviour
Copy the strategy used by Joe Girard, legendary Chevrolet salesman, recognised as the seller of the most cars in a year, 1,425 in 1975. No digital gimmicks, just relentless service, the belief that every customer was special and deserved to be treated as such. For example, Joe sent hand written birthday greetings, suggested service times and ensured there was a booking made, organised loan cars, and generally created a huge well of ‘reciprocity obligations’ among his customers.
Drucker said marketing’s job is to “create a customer.” Joe went one better. He created customers who created customers for him.
That’s the LCV of a one-off sale: A loop where exemplary service fuels advocacy, which drives hot leads back into your funnel. It’s not a transaction. It is a tree that bears fruit that produces seeds, from which more trees grow, to produce more seeds, creating a marketing flywheel.
Track success over time by recognising that the sale does not end with the initial transaction. Delight customers, they become advocates, which creates new leads. Track those!
Forget loyalty schemes. Build apostles.
Aug 1, 2025 | Branding, Marketing
‘Loyalty’ means that a consumer has internalised the value promised.
The purchase becomes automatic.
This is different to habit, which is easily disrupted. Loyalty comes from the ‘gut’ and confirms there is no alternative.
The only choice for a loyal consumer is to go without if their store is out of stock, or go down the road to another retailer.
Marketers often (usually) mistake preference and habit for loyalty. Market research usually makes the same mistake, acting as confirmation to marketers.
I drink a fair bit of coffee, working from home, and doing the ‘thinking’ stuff in the morning. To feed the habit, I buy a particular brand of coffee beans, almost always when it is on special. I also tend to ‘pantry-stock’.
The ‘normal’ shelf price is close to $40 a kilo. On special, it is usually $20 -$25.
Is my buying habit loyalty, or is it better described as regular or preferred?
If I was truly a loyal consumer, I would buy my preferred brand at ‘full’ price, but I never do.
On occasions when I have run out, I buy an alternative brand closer to the now benchmark price of $20. it is my opportunity to check out other brands, usually one I am in some way familiar with, that happens to be on special that week.
No loyalty shown there, only preference when the circumstances are right for me. Subject to the performance test of now and again, buying a competitor, I stick with my preferred brand, for now.
Jul 18, 2025 | Branding, Marketing
When you ask that question: ‘What is the most effective word in Sales” of a group, any group, the majority will respond with the word ‘free’.
The problem of course is that the question included the word sales, and by definition, free does not constitute a sale, simply an exchange. It might lead to a sale down the track and often does which is why it is used so extensively to sell digital products, the so-called freemium model.
This however is not what I regard to be the most effective word in sales.
That word is ‘imagine’.
If you were and estate agent seeking to convince a young couple that the house they were looking at currently was the right one for them to buy now, there are a bunch of tactics you could use. Most would be articulating the benefits of the house, location, condition, number of bedrooms, quiet neighborhood, and so on.
By contrast if the agent simply used the words ‘ imagine carrying your new bride over the threshold of your new home‘ leads to a different conversation and probably outcome.
One of my clients, Windows Factory, sells and installs thermally broken uPVC windows and doors. The temperature stability and resulting comfort, coupled with the reduction in power costs delivered by this technology are wonderful. However, for some, the greater benefit is that this technology dramatically reduces transmission of outside noise.
The sales conversion ratio difference between these two statements is dramatic:
- ‘ These thermally broken uPVC windows reduce outside noise by 70%’
- ‘ Imagine being having a quiet conversation with your partner uninterrupted by the noise from the road outside’.
Try it. There is no limit to the domains where human imagination can take us.
All it takes is some thought that allows you to summon an emotional response to your offer, adding to any benefit delivered by a recitation of the rational benefits.
Header credit: The late, great, John Lennon.
Jun 4, 2025 | Category, Customers, Demand chains, Marketing, retail
Mass market retailers all use the same, or very similar metric to measure store performance: Dollars revenue and/or margin per square foot, or linear shelf metre. In addition, they track the size and content of the customer ‘basket’ to optimise product range against those key performance measures.
This leads to a mindset of short term profit maximisation in the buying office, at the expense of everything else. Only senior levels talk about strategy, and then in most cases, they fail to grasp the qualitative reality of ‘strategy’ and fall back on the numbers.
Shoppers do not care about your margins/sq metre, irrespective of how you generate it (price, stock turn, or supplier ‘shelf rentals’) they care about range convenience, on shelf availability, and of course, price.
But price is only one of the considerations, an important one, but only one.
Ignoring the others is asking for trouble in the medium term
Trouble is what the Australian gorillas now have.
Their domestic supplier base has been brutalised, and the leverage they can exert on international suppliers is way more limited, simply because they do not have the scale to apply the pressure. Now in the absence of a high $A, they are suffering, and that suffering is unlikely to ease any time soon as the economy is likely to flatten in the wake of the ‘stupidity blanket’ being thrown over world trade by the US administration.
In addition, they now have become populist targets for a body politic that has no idea of the economics and dynamics of the ‘paddock to plate’ supply chain.
The marketing default has become loyalty cards, an added incentive to shop at the same chain, as they will give you something in return. Trouble is you cannot buy loyalty, you can only earn it. How many do you know with a wallet stuffed with ‘loyalty cards’ who are not in the slightest ‘Loyal’?
Jun 2, 2025 | AI, Communication, Governance
Analysis implies the intelligent interrogation of data, the use of differing ‘frames’ through which to see the data, and to enable those non obvious connections to be made.
First you need ‘clean’ data, without which, nothing that follows will be worth much.
Thoughtful, critical analysis of data leads to insight, from which comes that elusive lightbulb moment.
Reporting is the opposite, it simply requires the cleaning, summarising and posting of the data without the critical thought from which real insight evolves.
No lightbulb.
AI is good at that, while not being good at generating insight.
Being data rich but insight poor is now a very common problem.
AI will not solve it for you, people are needed. Not just any people, seat warmers, but the right people with the curiosity and ‘why not’ attitude of youth, combined with the wisdom of experience and domain knowledge.
Unfortunately, these people do not grow on trees, ready for the picking. You have to grow and nurture them yourself, while recognising that many will move on at some point. The old adage of a rising tide lifts all boats is nowhere more relevant.
May 30, 2025 | AI, Marketing
The market research industry turns over big dollars by providing reassurance to marketers that when they are wrong, they have an acceptable excuse.
The recent election campaign and associated polls demonstrate comprehensively how broken market research can be. It should have been simple. Is Labor going to win, will the conservatives take the lollies, or will it be a split result? It was almost a binary choice, but no poll I saw was even close.
Given that failure, how in heaven’s name can we reasonably expect such a broken system to deliver reliable answers to challenging questions about the future behaviour of customers and potential customers in a competitive and volatile environment? Add into the mix the inability of most marketers to understand the competing forces in their market sufficiently well to ask good questions and therefore write quality research briefs. That delivers a perfect recipe for pissing money against the wall in pursuit of reassurance.
Over the years as a much younger marketer, I spent a lot of money on market research. It took a while, but I did come to realise the data was only a tiny proportion of the game. The real challenge was building the wisdom, insight, and market gutfeel to be able to ask those really good questions. Then, when a surprising response emerged, have the curiosity to further interrogate it from a positive and genuinely inquisitive perspective to get an answer to the eternal question: Why is it so?
In the last year or so, and accelerating at an astonishing rate, is the ability delivered by AI to gather and process market and behavioural information that can be used to ask those challenging; why is it so’ questions.
The process of market research has been totally up-ended. No longer do you need to spend tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars over months to get shallow and often dated results. Now you can replicate the task quickly and cheaply with superior results using AI, and what is emerging as ‘synthetic research’.
Traditional research is good at telling you what has happened. It is good at counting. However, if you need to know what will happen in the future, and you use yesterdays tools, good luck!
