The Organic Percentage Over Time

When I left Lands' End in 1995, one of the challenges the analytically-focused person faced was the fact that some in Management did not believe that if you didn't mail a catalog 30% of the demand would still happen (from surrounding catalogs). This "fact" (measured via mail/holdout tests) meant that what was marginally profitable was, in fact, unprofitable. Nobody wants to be tied to something that is unprofitable. Consequently, facts were not accepted.

At the time I thought "these people just aren't smart enough to understand simple math". I was wrong. People are smart enough to understand facts, be it in marketing or politics. People choose to ignore facts for perfectly good reasons.

The organic percentage, at 30% in 1996, would become larger, creating ever-bigger problems.

By decade, the organic percentage grew.

• 1996:  30%.
• 2006:  50%.
• 2016:  65%.
• 2026:  80%.

In 2026, the only customers that can be profitably mailed are good or great customers. That's it.

And I get it ... some of you are reading this and you go back to your matchback analytics and you say "I'm good". You run a p&l on each segment and you believe you are mailing 36 month customers profitably. If you believe this, execute the following experiment.

• Assume your organic percentage isn't 80%, assume it is just 50%. Pretend like it is 2006.
• Run a p&l for each segment assuming your organic percentage is an old-school 50%.
• What does the analysis tell you?

It tells you an inconvenient truth.

• If you do what the analysis says, your company will be more profitable. Much more profitable.
• If you do what the analysis says, you will cost your company top-line sales/revenue/demand, and you have forces within your company who will never let you do that.

This is why so many catalog brands ultimately went bankrupt. They couldn't let the top-line contract, so they just kept doing what they were doing until unprofitable became "too unprofitable" while customer response also contracted.

When the AI bubble pops (and it most assuredly will pop), new ecommerce models fueled by what AI is supposed to become will emerge. Print will be forced to be leveraged only by brands with the GDP of Bolivia or will be a tactic to leverage with best customers with high iROAS. It will not be a channel to center an entire business around (and honestly, it hasn't been for 20 years). Also - the same forces that came for catalog marketing will come for old-school ecommerce in a few years. It's how capitalism works.