Surely You Believe ...

Speaking of Pickleball, I'm standing outside of Court 3 and a fellow player is asking about my business. I describe the type of projects I'm working on late in 2021 (Hillstrom's Newbies). 

This is the moment when the player asks a question I hear all of the time.

• "Surely you believe that the smartest play is to focus on Customer Loyalty. Given the choice between getting more profit from your most loyal buyers and spending money finding a new customer, you must focus on Loyalty. Right?"

Loyalty is a belief. There are marketers and the vendors who support marketers who strongly believe that you can take an ordinary customer and make the customer loyal ... or you can take a loyal customer and keep the customer in a status of loyalty.

The data I analyze shows that there is a serious "attribution issue" when it comes to loyalty.

In other words, customers have a natural rhythm. There might be 1,000 loyal customers and 700 will remain loyal in the next year and the marketer executes a program that causes 720 customers to remain loyal (net increase of 20 customers) but the marketer takes credit for 700 customers staying loyal and says that their tactics "work".

The marketer is wrong.

Now, moving the needle from 700 customers to 720 customers is HARD WORK and the marketer deserves credit for doing the hard work.

But taking credit for 720 customers (which I see happen every day)?

Surely you believe that isn't right!