This is a fun graph. One of my favorite images of all time was this misguided one from McKinsey about twenty years ago. Long-time readers have heard my gripes ... many times ... silly Venn Diagram. The image was a colossal analytical failure because there is a confounding variable ... as customers purchase more and more, they are more and more likely to purchase from multiple channels. The analysis error is identical to saying "Customers Who Purchase On Multiple Days Of The Week Are More Valuable Than Customers Buying From Just One Day Of The Week". You'll buy from multiple days of the w ..read more

A tropical system doesn't stay a tropical system forever. Take Milton for instance. A Category 5 hurricane at two different periods earlier this week, the storm slammed into Florida, was shredded apart by land, then emerged in the Atlantic as a post tropical cyclone. In other words, the storm is transformed by a traumatic event ... sure, we as humans experience a hurricane as a traumatic event, but the hurricane also experiences a traumatic event. Without boiling hot ocean water to fuel it, the storm transforms from a storm of tropical characteristics to a garden-variety low pressure syste ..read more

When a traditional catalog brand makes changes, I get a head's up via blog / email subscriber metrics. Blog unsubscribes happen from the company as much as a month before a decision is made, because some employees no longer have a need for the content I produce. LinkedIn requests for connections happen close to the implementation date of the decision. Email addresses bounce as the decision is made. So, yeah, I knew something was up at Orvis (click here for the news, sent to us by a long-time reader). And yes, close to 20% of my catalog-centric email subscribers have disappeared in the pas ..read more

A few weeks back I attended my first-ever CanJam ... a headphone conference. Yeah. I'm a nerd. Not surprisingly, the folks at Headphones.com were everywhere. They sponsored the event, they had a booth where you could try exotic headphones or the headphones they sold. You could interact with their staff (blue shirts above) ... the very people who lead their popular Noise Floor podcast / weekly video program on YouTube. Their hosts (you'd likely call 'em "influencers") led well-attended sessions about the science of the ear and impact on what you hear with your headphones. I heard a headpho ..read more

Allow me to show you. First, watch this video - it's pure interbreed dog craziness.  https://x.com/i/status/1841956538048520557 We can break down the action into a series of images. Like this one. I've time-stamped each image for reference purposes. We have a German Shepherd who leaves the pen, then jumps back in. Each time the German Shepherd jumps back in, one of the cream colored doxies (we'll call this pup "Sparky") tries to jump up and take a nibble out of the neck of the German Shepherd. Look at the elevation ... the extension of the back legs. Also notice that another cream colo ..read more

In this Factor Analysis, each Merchandise Category (17 of them, labeled MR01 to MR17) is plotted in two reduced "factors". If there is little distance between categories, then customers view the categories in a similar manner and likely cross-shop the categories. If there is a lot of distance between categories, then customers do not cross-shop the categories. Two categories stand out for this brand ... Category 02 and Category 17. Let's go back to our 18 month 1x buyers who only bought one item in a first order. Let's select those who only bought from Category 02. Among the fraction that r ..read more

Ok, you've read all about reactivation ... and scoring your customer base to know which customers you should be targeting. You've clicked on the images, you've paid attention, you've sent email messages. Now, loyal readers get a new project opportunity. My "Playbook" methodology is now available!! As with all new projects, I give loyal readers first chance to use the methodology at a discounted rate (so that I can test my programming code). Normal Cost:  $24,900. Your Price (Through The End of the Week):  $12,900. Click on the image below for a sampling of details. Contact me (kevinh ..read more

I recall the late Don Libey telling me about his enjoyment of Sherlock Holmes ... he wrote fan fiction, bought barrels of wine, bottled them in Sherlock Holmes themes, and drank them among like-minded individuals or sold them. Fan fiction as a hobby can be downright enjoyable. You've heard about people who write their own Seinfeld Script ... Kramer becomes a Presidential Debate moderator, George damages Jerry's car while pursuing his side hustle as a Lyft driver, Elaine dates a YouTube influencer with an inconvenient secret, and Jerry is obsessed with an air fryer. There, see how easy that was ..read more

Each week, you acquire new customers. Count the number of new customers by segment. Elite = 0 Customers (0%) Loyal = 1 Customer (< 0.1%) Quality = 16 Customers (< 0.1%) Average = 5,006 Customers (25.5%) Struggling = 14,573 Customers (74.4%) Remember, Struggling customers have an annual rebuy rate < 20%. If 74.4% of your new customers have virtually no chance of buying again in the next year, your marketing team and your merchandise team (it's both) are doing something wrong. Something really, really wrong. You can report on this metric weekly - keep track of how your Average/Strug ..read more

It is a long, hard slog to nudge a customer from Average to Quality to Loyal to Elite status. Even harder if the customer is Struggling and you have to work hard just to get the customer to Average. Here is a year-over-year view of customer migration for the brand we've studied in the past month. I mean, look across the Quality row ... you can get a Quality customer to repurchase and "what" the customer buys and "how" (i.e. Marketplaces) the customer buys something drives the customer from Quality down to Average. Or Average to Struggling. This stuff is hard work, and the modern marketer ju ..read more