January

January can be a "blah" month from a marketing standpoint. The thrill of achieving an order at 60% off is replaced by the tepid response of a customer getting 70% off liquidations products.

Why not use January as your "experimentation month"? Try many different ideas, see what works and doesn't work.

We need more experimentation in ecommerce. Anything something gets "optimized", as ecommerce unfortunately is, there is an opportunity to experiment, to try new ideas. Use January as a month to experiment and learn.

Speaking of Creativity

Here - here's an "omnichannel brand" as the pundits like to say, doing something risky. Go ahead, click here! More here.

You could send eleven (11) Cyber Monday messages on Cyber Monday and the day after as one popular brand did, offering 80% off sale (think about that one).

Or, you could do something creative.

Do something creative.

Tis The Season

The best businesses I work with balance merchandise, marketing, and creative.

Cyber Monday obviously skews strongly to pricing ... no need for marketing / creative brilliance. That's how Thought Leaders like things ... they either make everything so complicated you couldn't possibly execute properly (#omnichannel) or they pick a corner of the triangle above and tell you that excellence in one area equates to excellence in all areas.

With Christmas a few weeks away, large businesses are applying their version of the "triangle" above to coax customers into orders. Tis the season for the image they believe will convert a customer to an incremental order. Any similarities?

When the largest "brands" all choose one direction, you have an opportunity to choose another direction. Kohl's / Macy's / Target / Walmart all clearly view the world through the eyes of a specific type of female aligned with the color "red".

Ecommerce is begging for somebody to be creative. It's one thing to optimize boring/sterile Facebook Ads paired with 60% off on Cyber Monday. It's another thing for agencies to recommend one type of woman as your "idealized consumer". It's difficult to walk away from that world and chart your own course via creative strategies. But it's necessary as we move into 2026.

Now We're Counting Grocery Purchases For Black Friday - Cyber Monday? Oh, I Guess We Are

He bought canned pineapples, it's part of the record!

"... consumers shopping mainly at supermarkets".

Look around, because we are constantly being reminded what happens when we put non-smart people in charge of things, or worse, give them access to a megaphone.

"... consumers shopping mainly at supermarkets".

" ... according to a survey".

Want To See If Your Customers Are Paying Attention To You?

Buried deep on the Headphones.com website is this (click here for proof). The comments were obviously staged as well, and are delightful.

I share this with you after enduring a day of absolute Cyber Monday pummeling. One "brand" sent me six email messages promoting Cyber Monday, offering 60% off. Three went straight into my junk folder, three persevered and made it to my inbox.

When you don't have a creative bone in your org structure, you send six email messages on Cyber Monday promoting 60% off. It's all you have - you are begging the customer to buy something on a day that generates customers who have low long-term value. You'll spend the rest of the year offering more discounts because rebuy rates are too low. You'll spend eternity doing this, you can't get out of the cycle. You populate your customer file with the worst possible customers, the ones who only purchase "because it is a game".

You do not want those customers.

And yet?

So darn many of you keep attracting those customers.

Give creativity a try. It won't work at first - it can't work when the customer has been trained to accept enormous discounts. It is the path out, however.

It's Here

Yup, Cyber Monday. Are you taking care of your customers today or are you taking care of those who earn money via thought leadership?

Performance Bonuses

As a 26 year old at Lands' End, I enjoyed the period between Thanksgiving and Christmas. All of the hectic work needed to get Holiday catalogs out the door happened in August / September. By Thanksgiving, there was nothing left to do but count the money. And get February / March catalogs out the door. The train must run on schedule.

So there I am, sitting at my desk right before Christmas, when my boss stops by and hands me a check.

"What is this?"

"Half of your annual bonus."

"I get a bonus?"

"Yes. If the company meets profit goals, you share in the profit."

"Say what now?"

"We met our profit goals. Our owner pays half before Christmas because he knows it is important for families to have the money at Christmas. He pays the other half when our fiscal year results are announced in March."

Well I've never been so excited to get half of 10% of $28,000 in my life, less taxes and withholding!

From that moment, I became obsessed with profit. It was a way for everybody to get paid more money!

The incentive only goes up from there ... all of a sudden it's a 20% bonus as a Manager, a 40% bonus as a Director ... it was quite a bit more than that when I was a VP at Nordstrom. Do the math on that one.

An Eddie Bauer bonus became the down payment on a first home. That was meaningful.

My staff at Nordstrom became agitated when our division was folded into the Retail division. The Online division at the time had a bonus structure, the Retail division did not (for analysts / project managers). I was able to get half of the annual bonus added to their annual salaries, guaranteeing them something. Didn't matter. They were livid they weren't being rewarded for a year of hard work.

Bonuses accomplish three things.

1. They allow employees to share in the success of a company.
2. They teach employees to focus on what matters to Management / Ownership. In most cases, that was either sales growth and/or profit.
3. The employee isn't performing soulless work while hoping for a 2% cost of living increase when the Owner sails off in a yacht. There's a reason, a purpose, for doing a good job if salary increases are unlikely and promotions are unlikely.

I realize this message won't get anybody to do anything different. But that's not the purpose. The goal here is to appreciate those of you who are blessed, who might get a check in the next month or early next year ... helping you appreciate your lot in life. Bonuses are good things.

The Cyber Window

In my projects, I create a variable that measures if a customer purchases during what I call the "Cyber Window".

• The Wednesday before Thanksgiving to the Saturday after Cyber Monday is the Cyber Window.

My Elite Program clients recently learned how valuable all these customers are that are acquired at 60% off plus free shipping (plus 80% off clearance items).

One of the biggest problems you face is the "repurchase opportunity" for Cyber Window buyers. When you acquire a customer in September or October, the customer is very likely to buy again in November / December. You get to double-dip your chip, you generate a second order quickly. That dynamic drives an increase in future value. The Cyber Monday window? It's doomed to fail. You fulfill the need of the customer to get a gift for Christmas (in many cases), so the customer is dormant through Christmas, and then the customer is dormant in January / February because you are liquidating stuff and the customer isn't there for liquidated merchandise, the customer had a need met via a gift purchase at 60% off.  The "brand" (that's you) misses out on the "response opportunity", driving down future value.

So stop doing that!

I get it, you want to acquire customers, and it is easy to do so during the Cyber Window. So you can do that. But don't be a Lemonhead and acquire the customer at 60% off so you don't make any profit and then fail to generate profit downstream ... you're not here to fill the void with empty calories.

Tell me why I'm wrong (kevinh@minethatdata.com).

Business Therapy!

Need Business Therapy? Want to talk about anything related to your business?

If you'd like an hour of Business Therapy, contact me now (kevinh@minethatdata.com) to get started. Here is a link to all other project opportunities.

Well, That Link Didn't Work

This is the link about the Tennessee basketball coach ... yesterday's link was incorrect. Yay, errors!

Business Parallels

I look to sports for parallels for my clients. I have to, because there are few business parallels to talk about. If somebody is truly doing something great, the greatness gets sanitized into "5 Tips For Cyber Monday Success (Number 3 Will Surprise You)". No company is going to share that Lucy in Marketing is doing amazing things. In fact, "Lucy" will have to get a job somewhere else because "Lucy" will never be compensated fairly for her accomplishments ... and that means Lucy won't be compensated fairly at her next job, either. Compensation, unfortunately, is tied to being a CEO or C-Level executive, and Lucy will be told that she's "not ready" for that ... aka, the company doesn't want to compensate her for her contributions. (bonus points if you can see what AI messed up in the image of Lucy I asked AI to draw).

Wow, where did all of that come from?

It's different in sports. If you do a good job at a smaller University, bigger Universities come calling, because everybody can see the outcome (wins) of your efforts. In business, nobody can see what Lucy accomplished. In sports, people actually want to learn more about what somebody did to become successful, oftentimes the prescription for success is shared.

I find myself looking for business parallels in sports. I frequently look for people in sports who "do things differently", who then have success, who are criticized for their success because their success doesn't align with "best practices".

Until he passed, I so enjoyed reading about Mike Leach. Yeah, he had a scandal or two. But he also did things differently, and he constantly won at places where coaches don't usually win. Do you want to read some random thoughts from the man? Try this (click here).

Which brings me to Kim Caldwell (click here). The Women's College Basketball Coach at Tennessee. Imagine being in your mid-30s, coaching at the school that Pat Summitt made famous? Imagine having just one year of D1 coaching experience under your belt?

I adore stories like this!

I adore them because I get to meet people like this in my work. They're flying under the radar, it's easy to see their greatness, even at a time when their own company likely doesn't see it. It's easy to look at "Lucy" and imagine her running a business in twenty years ... though she should probably be running a business within five years.

There are so many brilliant people working in ecommerce. We need to give them the kind of chance that Tennessee gave Kim Caldwell.

The future is so bright! Young leaders are comin', folks!

Merchant Chaos

Look, it isn't easy to be a merchant. You're always wrong. Business success ultimately rests on your shoulders. Sure, the trade journalists and vendors claim that "SEAMLESS PAYMENTS" are the key to Q4 success. They are wrong. Horribly wrong. Businesses that sell stuff that customers want know the key to success.

However ... merchants don't have to behave in a chaotic manner.

I see merchant chaos all the time in my Comp Segment analytics.

I look at new merchandise comps and existing merchandise comps.

The two tables are filled with chaos. New Merchandise ... look at October / November / December ... big comp segment gains in new merchandise, followed by five consecutive months of new merchandise declines. Somebody made big bets for "Holiday" and then had a poor plan for Spring. Chaos.

Existing Merchandise ... we see seven consecutive months of losses, five of the months feature double-digit declines. That's a problem! And then we see two straight months of huge gains, on top of acceptable performance the year prior. Chaos!

I'll take the data a step further ... analyzing comps for items selling at/above their historical average price point and for items selling below their historical average price point (i.e. discounting).

Why did existing merchandise comps perform well? Because of discounts/promotions ... April / May comps on discounted items was +21% and +33%. More chaos! Try planning the following April / May off of chaotic tactics.

You can see the signs of a sick business here.

• Full Priced Comps in the Past Year = -8%.
• Discounted Comps in the Past Year = +17%.
• Total Merch Comps in the Past Year = -1%.
• New/Reactivated Comps in the Past Year = +4%.

This business is sick. Unhealthy. Management is papering over the challenges by discounting. The Smart Marketer is trying to protect the future by adding new/reactivated buyers.

Do you have comparable analytics to what I've illustrated here? Are you actively tracking what is happening at the brand you work for? As you've learned this week, this stuff is really important, isn't it?

Smart Marketer > Bad Merchandise Productivity

The comp segment analysis tells me a lot about how smart the marketer is.

Look at January / February / March. Comp Segment productivity (customers with exactly two purchases in the past year, measuring how much they spend in the next month) was awful ... -16% / -20% / -15%. 

Now look at Comp New/Reactivated customer counts for Jan / Feb / Mar. +5% / +2% / +3%.

This is a "tell" ... it tells me that there is a Smart Marketer working for the company. When existing customers don't like what you are selling, new/reactivated buyers shouldn't like it either. However, the Smart Marketer doesn't care what the merchants are doing (more on this topic tomorrow). The Smart Marketer knows that if merchandise isn't performing, then new/reactivated customers have to increase, for three reasons.

1. To meet short-term demand/sales goals.
2. To move inventory, you don't want that stuff stacking up during a downturn, that only creates more discounts and poisons the customer file further.
3. To generate enough customers to protect next year.

The Smart Marketer knows these things. The Smart Marketer protects the business, knowing the Smart Marketer WILL NOT GET CREDIT for protecting the business. The Smart Marketer does it because it is the right thing to do.

The Lemonhead? The Lemonhead sees a sales decline and cuts the marketing budget, saving pennies, harming the ability to move inventory today, harming the ability of the brand to be successful tomorrow.

Is A Smart Marketer Working At This Company?

Back to our Rolling-Twelve Month Analysis.

There are times when a smart marketer is trying to overcome core merchandising issues. This analysis offers hints of a smart marketer.

• Total Demand is flat in the past year.
• Total Customers are up in the past year.
• Spend per Customer is down $3 in the past year.

Smart marketers figure out how to grow customer counts when merchants suffer missteps (hint - all merchants suffer missteps - doesn't mean the merchant is bad, trust me, you'll know when you run across a bad merchant).

On an annual basis, I evaluate the productivity of twelve-month buyers and new/reactivated buyers.

This business has a rebuy rate problem. No, rebuy rates < 25% are not "bad", they are a function of what you sell. If the customer doesn't need what you sell annually, your rebuy rates will be low. Having said that, rebuy rates slumped from 23.9% to 19.2% over a multi-year period of time. It shouldn't be a surprise that as rebuy rates dwindle, price per item purchased increased.

Compared to a four-year average, rebuy rates are -9%, spend per repurchaser is +6%, the net of each is a -4% change in demand per inventory (rebuy rate times spend per repurchaser).

Customer productivity is down.

New/Reactivated buyer counts, however, are at a four-year high.

In other words, there is a Smart Marketer working at this company. The Smart Marketer figured out how to overcome a customer productivity issue via more new/reactivated buyers.

It should not surprise you that there are non-smart options out there. There are few things worse than a Lemonheaded Marketer who cuts back on marketing investment (which generally impacts new/reactivated buyers most) in collaboration with a short-term profit-focused Chief Financial Officer. Profit results frequently improve for a short period of time. The customer file contracts, and merchandise productivity is not addressed, resulting in a miserable second year.

Diagnosing a Problem

Ever wonder how I quickly diagnose issues?

This week, I'm going to share a handful of tables used in my Elite Program runs. Many of you already participate in the Elite Program. Most of you should have something comparable that you look at internally. It's been my experience that those who don't have something comparable "make up" a lot of theories about why business is good/bad.

Here is a Rolling Twelve Month analysis. Look at the table, and tell me what this business did to cook the books.

There are many "rolling analysis skeptics". These are the kind of folks who, in my hobby (headphone), like treble-enhanced planar magnetic drivers. They want all the details. I'm more of a tube amp kind of person, I like a warmer signature, smoothed over. I want a longitudinal view of a business. I want to see when the merchant made a mistake. I want to see when the finance professional injected herself into the business. I want to see when a marketer made a mistake. I want to see all of that in the context of time.

This is one of those situations where the CEO might tell me that everything is fine, the business is stable at around $40,000,000 per year, top-line sales.

No. The business is cooking the books.

Why do I say that?

The two columns on the far right side of the table.

• Demand from Items Selling Above Their Average Price Point.
• Demand from Items Selling Below Their Average Price Point.

Let's say you have an item that sells for $49.99. The marketer decides to run a promotion, 40% off. Now the item sells for $29.99. When the item sells for $49.99, it is selling at/above their historical average price point. When the item sells for $29.99, it sells below their historical average price point.

Now go back to the two columns on the far right side of the table.

Items selling at/above their historical price point:

• $27.9 million past year.
• $30.5 million a year ago.
• $31.7 million two years ago.
• $31.0 million three years ago.

Here are items selling below their historical price point.

• $12.7 million past year.
• $10.0 million a year ago.
•   $9.2 million two years ago.
• $10.9 million three years ago.

The past year tells us an interesting story. Full-priced selling declined by $2.6 million while off-priced selling increased by $2.7 million.

In other words, Management "cooked the books" ... they likely saw that they weren't going to meet budget, so they lowered prices via promotions to get the top-line "in-line".

Either this company has an inventory problem (rectified by clearing out products at lower prices), it is missing budget (which often causes an inventory problem) due to lower customer response, it has a forecast issue (the forecast was mistakenly assigned to be too high for what customers can deliver), or all off the above.

Are there other ways to diagnose this issue? Of course. Are you using other methods? Too often, the answer is "no". There's just speculation ... which is fun ... but isn't meaningful.

• 
  

Five Tiers of Email Subscribers

You don't segment email campaigns to better target customers ... there are models / equations / AI to do all of that and do it really well.

You segment email campaigns to understand what is happening.

Segmentation doesn't have to be complicated. Here are five tiers / segments. If a customer doesn't meet the criteria for (1), you move down to (2) etc.

1. 1+ Email Purchase in the Past Year.
2. 1+ Email Click-Through in the Past Year.
3. 1+ Email Open in the Past Year.
4. 1+ Purchase in the Past Year, Not via Email Marketing.
5. All Other Email Subscribers.

For each campaign, you measure performance by each of the five tiers of email subscribers. Tiers (1) and (2) will generate the vast majority of sales caused by email marketing. Tier (5) is the place where you execute your experiments, because these people are unlikely to open/click so you can try different ideas to see what might work ... if something works, move it up to Tier (4), if it works there, keep moving it up the ladder. Tier (3) is also a great place to experiment with new ideas.

Clients with very good email marketing programs generate +/- 25% of annual ecommerce sales from email marketing. If you aren't there yet, segment customers as outlined above, experiment, and measure results.

MRV in the Wild

Here's a recent email campaign from Macy's.

The $24.99 UGG Throw. That's the place where MRV matters.

Items featured in email campaigns should likely have two key qualities.

1. A Winning or Contending Item (to boost sales).
2. High MRV (S-Tier or A-Tier), to boost the future value of the customers who buy the item.

If you want a higher annual repurchase rate and all the loyalty benefits that come with it, why wouldn't you advertise your best-selling items that also cause customers to become more likely to repurchase in the future?

Contact me now (kevinh@minethatdata.com) for a quick $5,000 MRV run, paired with quarterly updates for a year at no additional cost to you.

Let's Try Something!!

I purposely bundle my Merchandise Residual Value (MRV) analysis into my new customer "S-Tier" analysis ... for good reason. It only makes logical sense to market the products that cause customers to become more "loyal" to prospects who are considering buying from you for the first time. It's the biggest "duh" in marketing.

Of course, some of you don't want to spend money analyzing new customers. You just want to know which items cause customers to be more "loyal". That makes sense.

So let's try something. For the rest of the week, I'll charge you just $5,000 for a simplified Merchandise Residual Value (MRV) run ... no writeup or detailed analysis or next steps or recommendations ... and I'll score your items quarterly for the next year. Blog followers only ... you get this opportunity because you've been loyal to me for a very long time.

Contact me now (kevinh@minethatdata.com).

Scarne on Cards

My parents bought this book for me in the mid-70s ... apparently they believed I had potential to be a gambler or loved card games, or both.

Turns out I enjoy statistics. And this book had a story in it that resonated with me in the 70s and the story sticks with me in my day job in 2025.

The author talked about playing a poker game in a casino. Each of six players starts with $100 (the specifics are likely different). At the end of each hand, the dealer would take $2 from the pot as the "house cut", the winner earned everything else. After fifty hands, $100 has been removed from the players. After one-hundred-and-fifty hands $300 has been removed from the players, leaving just $300. Assuming everybody had equal odds of winning, it meant that each player had $50 of their original $100. Everybody was losing money. If somebody was winning, it meant other players were broke.

His advice? Don't play games where the house gets a consistent and repeatable cut. You can't win. 

There are times when I look at the profit-and-loss statement of a brand and this story comes to mind. You know the company, they spend 25% of net sales on marketing expenses. Those are dollars going out of the pot, a cut to the house (Google, Facebook, etc). They get money, Shopify gets money, Listrak gets money, your favorite AI vendor is about to get a slice of your pie. In the catalog ecosystem, it's worse, because everybody in the e-commerce ecosystem gets a cut PLUS the paper people get a cut, your printer gets a cut, the USPS gets a cut, your boutique catalog agency gets a cut.

Is it any wonder that I tell you that you need ORGANIC orders, orders that don't happen because of marketing ... and when I tell you that the vendor ecosystem comes-a-fightin'???? They're the casino when the 1-800 number tells the gambler to stop gambling!

I'm not stupid (on this topic). You have no choice but to develop clever stuff that doesn't cost anything. That's your job! That's how your p&l works. That's how ownership keeps things going. That's how your Executive Team earn bonuses. That's how your Manager and Director make a credible living. That's how the analyst gets enough experience to eventually work in a Leadership role. 

Profit funds everything.

Think about it this way. You have a $50,000,000 brand that employs 125 people ... 75 of 'em are essentially earning $35,000 a year and the remaining 50 earn an average of $100,000. Multiply that out and it's around $7,600,000 in salary. If your brand is paying 25% of net sales in advertising costs, it means the vendors figured out how to get $12,500,000 while the actual employees ... the very ones who pay the vendors ... are only getting $7,600,000.

On what planet should your "trusted partners" earn 60%+ more than your employees earn? You're the one paying THEM!!!

Your job is to generate ORGANIC orders, orders that happen without the aid of marketing / advertising. Your co-workers depend on you to do that. So does ownership.

Experimentation

Last week I threw a handful of random posts at you ... several links, with the goal being to see what you click on. Is it marketing-related information? Is it analytics-related information? Is it random information?

What was the number one most-clicked link last week?

• Crappie Bites.

This is the reason all those data-driven gurus are WRONG. Wrong. Horribly wrong. If I followed all of you down the click-centric rabbit hole I'd be out of business within a month.

Don't do what the data tells you to do.

There's a certain amount of intuition you must have. Many of you possess it. If you are early in your career, you lack intuition, so data is really important. The intuition of your boss/leaders is important, it balances the experience you lack. Yeah, now you see the importance of strong leadership.

But at some point in your career (it's been my experience that intuition becomes important in the 30-35 year old range ... a decade +/- of experience) your intuition takes center stage. You know when you see something (crappie bites) that you shouldn't pay attention to. Or you realize you should do the opposite of what the data suggests.

Somewhere in your fifties a fusion of intuition, calm, and practicality takes over ... you are no longer at the forefront of technology and modern marketing/analytics, nor should you be. You have other gifts that are needed. Individual data points (crappie bites) take on a different meaning. Experimentation becomes more important than testing (this is an important distinction, FYI).

Experimentation is important. You can learn more from experimentation than you can from properly-calibrated tests, especially if you combine your intuition with experimentation results.

Merchandise Residual Value and Winning Items

Let's say you want to go crappie fishing. You'd need your rod/reel. Maybe a squirming grub. And some crappie bites. You wouldn't impale a worm on a hook and hope for the best.

The same concept applies to fishing for new customers.

You don't say "60% OFF LIMITED TIME ONLY" which really means "IT'S LIMITED BECAUSE NEXT WEEK WE'RE 70% OFF!"

I mean, that's lazy and stupid. It's a marketing best practice, but it is lazy and stupid.

Because you are smart, you "curate" your assortment for prospects that could become new customers.

• Best Selling Items.
• Items That Attract Customers More Likely To Purchase In The Future.

Why best selling items? Because those items have higher conversion rates, better ROAS, and better profit per new customer. Why waste marketing dollars on stuff that doesn't sell? Are you are Lemonhead? No!

Why high MRV items? Because you want new customers who are more likely to repurchase in the future than new customers who are one-and-done. Why waste marketing dollars on new customers who don't buy again? Are you a Lemonhead? No!

Your "prospecting assortment" is different than your overall merchandising assortment.

1. Only offer winning or high-contending items, improving your cost per new customer.
2. Only offer items that increase the probability of a new customer buying again by 20% (high MRV items), improving your downstream rebuy rates.

It's so easy.

So why aren't you doing this?

Training / Academies

Here in Phoenix, the USL team (Phoenix Rising) has an Academy. This is common in soccer / football, of course. The next generation of players are developed, giving the parent team an opportunity to lock-in talent trained in the methodologies and strategies of the parent team.

The NBA has a G-League and College Basketball.

The NFL has College Football.

MLB has the Minor Leagues (Rookie, A, AA, AAA).

E-Commerce is already being filled with Academies ... they are otherwise called "AI". We're in the top-of-the-first-inning in AI. We are training AI to do things to make our lives both easier and more strategic in nature.

As you already know, AI needs to be "trained". It isn't magic. It requires human smarts.

Are you a good "trainer"? Do you know what information AI needs to be trained properly. Does the agency that uses AI know what information needs to be used to train AI properly?

The answer is invariably going to be "no". Dumb people, dumb agencies, and smart algorithms will produce dumb outcomes.

You can train AI to create the best-performing omnichannel campaigns on Facebook, and AI will do what you train it to do. But if you have no business sense whatsoever and want to push moronic ommnichannel slop at a customer who could care less, you will optimize a very low performing campaign into low-performing territory.

Somebody has to be the smart person in the room. Why can't that person be you?

Backgammon

This video of a Backgammon championship garnered more than 175,000 views to-date. It's on YouTube, there are analysts discussing the match, they have a computer that assesses who is "making errors" in real-time, the computer shares the probability of winning in real-time, and the analysts even play a game during a break with one of the individuals in live chat.

Also - Pickleball TV is now a channel on YouTube TV ... nearly ten million subscribers can watch professional pickleball matches 24/7/365. Was that ever a possibility a decade ago? As of tonight, you can't watch ESPN or ABC on YouTube TV but you can watch the World Championships of Pickleball live.

What does this have to do with e-commerce?

There is a lot of innovation these days. Here's an AI tool that promises to replace most of the functions of marketing for small businesses, allowing the marketer to be "strategic". Which is code, of course, for "we're going to take your job and you will be the one who will pay us to give up your job". A lot of innovation, no doubt ... similar to the Backgammon channel above, where the computer is doing a lot of work and yet the analysts still convert everything into plain language. The analysts also promote the book they wrote during the match ... monetizing the event in their favor. Heck, they promote their book being on Backgammon Galaxy (click here). Who knew there was a store called Backgammon Galaxy? More important - that store is on Shopify. While you were trying to adhere to a nonsense-based Omnichannel Thesis that your boutique agency demanded you adhere to (#printisback), Shopify took over the world. 

Imagine five years from now ... your store is on Shopify, Shopify AI is doing your marketing and is fully integrated with the Shopify Ecosystem so when your prospect purchases a t-shirt from Backgammon Galaxy Shopify AI sends the customer a text message encouraging the customer to buy from your store ... all automated, all out of your control. 

It's coming. You know it is coming. You and I are unprepared for this future. We will adapt.

P.S.:  One of the analysts on the Backgammon broadcast said "Learn the Rules, then Break the Rules". That's a smart line. How does that line apply to your business?

P.P.S.:  Backgammon Strategy meets AI Principles. A book on Backgammon Galaxy. Would you be able to write a book called "E-Commerce Strategy meets AI Principles"???

The "Cyber Window"

Since the pattern has repeated for more than twenty years, I thought I'd coin a term for you. Those who participated in the October run of the Elite Program already know the answer to what is coming.

The "Cyber Window":  The period between the day before Thanksgiving (November 26 this year) and the Saturday after Cyber Monday (December 6 this year). A timeframe featuring a veritable buffet of profitless discounts / promotions designed to please anybody that does not have p&l responsibility.

Identify the quality of new customers acquired during the "Cyber Window". It's a fun / revealing analysis.

You Always Want Ideas - Here's One

Chinese headphone companies offer lots of discounts / promotions on November 11.

One of the big umbrella brands, Linsoul, is offering three tiers of discounts that you pre-purchase. Here is one of the tiers.

By spending $1.11, you get $25 off $60 plus access to the event. That's the Bronze Pass. Here are the Silver and Gold level incentives.

Now, from a data collection standpoint, imagine what you could do with knowledge of the fact that some of your customers will "pre-pay" for access to discounts? How does this fact differ from the sloppy customer who simply gets 30% off from the even-sloppier marketer?

If you're about to criticize me for sharing a tactic with you (and yes, I get mail when I do this stuff), think about taking a look in the mirror and asking yourself why your 60% off plus free shipping is more useful than what is outlined above?

 

Pick Up A Broom

A little bit of a parable for you.

In my community (a retirement community though I'm not retired, which of course is a goal I will one day achieve), I am the Master of Ceremonies for a 200 person party. Catered meal, I facilitate the program. Every year there are maybe 25 people out of 200 who don't like the party. They have "ideas". 

• "Have you thought about serving pheasant, because people love easting pheasant."
• "Why don't you host the party outside? I mean, so what if it rains?"
• "The bar ran out of Pabst beer, and that's on you, that's your fault, you ruined the party."

I'm on a party planning committee. Each year maybe 3 of the 25 grumblers "wants to do something about it". They ask to join our committee, we say yes, we host a post-mortem of the party from the prior year, the three new individuals air their grievances, we listen, we tell the new people that maybe they could be the ones who fix the problem. If there isn't enough Pabst Beer, is the new person willing to work with catering to solve the problem?

What do you think happens when the person raising the issue is asked to solve the problem?

Yeah, the person quits the committee.

The post mortem on the United States will show that Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC destroyed the country from within ... creating a disincentive for those who "do" the work ... creating fabulous incentives for those who criticize those who "do" the work.

Are there any parallels in retail and/or e-commerce? Maybe you listen to a podcaster who has ideas about how to fix JCP. Why don't you (the podcaster) go fix JCP? Put your reputation on the line and see if you are an Actual Leader or just a Thought Leader.

My wife worked with an HR leader who used to say "Pick Up A Broom" when somebody would criticize. In other words, when somebody accidentally empties a box of Special K cereal on the floor you can point that fact out to somebody, or you can pick up a broom and clean up the mess yourself.

P.S.:  Ask me sometime what it was like to run pickleball ratings for a year at my pickleball club. There were plenty of incentives for those who criticized people who "did" the work.

Returns

As J. Peterman said on Seinfeld ... "well that looks like a lot of words"

The omnichannel thesis loves free returns. 

Have you ever actually analyzed how customers who return merchandise behave?

First, assume you have three customers.

• Customer #1 = Spends $100, Keeps $100.
• Customer #2 = Spends $150, Keeps $100.
• Customer #3 = Spends $150, Keeps $150.

Which customer is most valuable?

This one is a fun exercise. It generally requires a bit of regression nuance to parse out the value of the $50 that is returned. In most projects, Customer #2 is more likely to repurchase in the future than Customer #1 but less likely to repurchase in the future than Customer #3. In terms of value, Customer #2 is less valuable than Customer #1 because of the costs associated with the return.

Second, there is a limit where returns behavior becomes punitive. A whopping thirty-two years ago at Lands' End we used the Hyperbolic Tangent Function to model returns behavior (we used this function because we had customers who returned more merchandise than they purchased ... ponder that one). We learned something interesting (I shared this with you previously).

• Any customer purchasing at least three times and returning at least 70% of what they purchased was a customer we didn't want to market to anymore, because that customer would return 60% of future merchandise ... the relationship would not be profitable.

In 1993 that was a big deal ... it meant that the 13-50 catalogs this customer would normally receive were reduced to maybe four. And wowzer, did the customers who went from 13-50 catalogs per year to four HOWL. I caused our call center employees a bunch of grief.

In 2025, why does the high returns customer deserve ten (10) email campaigns per week? Why not cut that number down from ten to two? You are not stopping the customer from buying from you ... you are simply cutting back on marketing to the customer who wants to return stuff.

Perform the analysis, and do something!

Parsing Words

This one is filled with goodies.

Among the words/phrases used to smear actual meaning:

• Leverage
• Unifying Campaign
• Global
• Cultural Activations
• Emotional Core
• Shared Human Experience
• Powerful Anthem
• Movement
• Resonating
• Story-Rich
• Resonance

There is no mention that sales actually increased. There is a reference to an "18% increase in purchase consideration", whatever that means.

Granted, the purpose of many marketing campaigns is to create awareness - I myself preach it.

But at some point somebody must buy something.

I recall working at Nordstrom ... one year we spent something like $15,000,000 on Fashion Week in NYC. We asked our customers to download a program (pre-app days) to keep up with all the action that week (our marketing agency came up with this idea). I don't remember the exact numbers, but a few thousand customers downloaded the program ... not a failure but certainly an expensive way to burn money.

I recall performing the analysis of our Fashion Week campaign, thousands in sales against fifteen million in cost. I recall my boss (the Chief Marketing Officer) saying "your analysis will never see the light of day". Instead we used phrases designed to smear the real meaning ... stuff like "resonating" and "powerful" and "community".

A trade journalist once told me that "everybody wants to read a case study but nobody wants to share a case study." There is a good reason for that. If something truly worked, why would you give a blue print to the competition?

Of course, this means you instead get to read all about stuff that resonates with the "emotional core" of the customer.