Cut Off

Have you take a longer view of customer data? In other words, you look at marketing campaigns, sure ... but have you looked at (for instance) customer acquisition counts over the past 10-20 years?

It's common for e-commerce brands to have decent performance over time, with new customers sometimes being down, mostly up a lot, with a positive trajectory over time.

Old-school catalog brands have experienced something quite different. Their new/reactivated buyer count trajectory might look something like this.

There are two trends you should observe here.

1. The long-term structural decline in new customers.
2. The dramatic impact of COVID in 2020-2021.

If a business leader mis-read what happened in 2020-2021 (and many did), the last few years have been humbling.

Some of you have been with me for nearly twenty years. You remember when I pleaded with you in 2016 to build new customer acquisition programs. The data suggests few of you listened. I remember giving two presentations in 2016 ... one at a conference in Dayton, one at a conference in Savannah. 

At each conference, one individual in the audience had that smug look before asking a question. In Dayton, the woman told me that customer acquisition ideas wouldn't work, then asked me "what else do you have for us today?" I wonder if she is gainfully employed in catalog marketing anymore? In Savannah, it was a business owner. Front row. He thanked me for my ideas, then looked at the audience and told the attendees that he didn't need any customer acquisition ideas, that he had been through ups and downs for thirty years and his print-centric agenda would stand the test of time. 

Sure it would.

In 2019 at a conference, the paper rep informed me that he would not let me take food off of his table. He told me that he would make sure print-centric brands continued using paper and the omnichannel tools that leveraged paper.

It's as if many of these professionals purposely ignored the check engine light, like Penny on The Big Bang Theory.

Many of you reading this are Business Owners. You are in your 50s or 60s and are looking for an exit. It shouldn't surprise you one bit that there isn't a market for contracting paper-centric brands. There is a market for e-commerce brands that have well-crafted digital customer acquisition programs, mostly fueled by brilliant social media efforts. These businesses have in-house experts who know how to generate attention, attention that leads to prospects, prospects who become customers, customers who become loyalists.

One other fascinating tidbit from looking at catalog brands over the past twenty years.

• Merchandise Productivity is UP over time ... by between 20% and 40%.

This is an amazing finding, one that speaks to merchandise smarts and marketing shortfalls. Merchandise brilliance manifests itself via comp segment merchandise productivity. Catalog brands have done just as good a job as e-commerce brands at generating more from existing customers. Marketing brilliance manifests itself via new/reactivated customer counts. A relentless dependence upon paper and trusted partners did not result in marketing brilliance.

So now, we're in a situation where marketing chops needs to be rebuilt. It's no different than my 2008 Lexus RX400h. It is a great car. It's an old car. Increasingly I have to spend thousands each year just to keep it on the road. Eventually, I'll be left with no choice but to start over with a new car. The easy decision is to spend another $2,000 and keep it on the road another year. The hard decision is to start over.

Hard decisions are coming for old-school paper-based brands who are now cut off from the modern customer acquisition ecosystem.