Through human analysis and machine learning, we’ve scoured hundreds of millions or records describing the spending, behaviors, and other descriptors of customers –before and after the start of the pandemic.  For all of the challenges it presents, from a pure data analysis standpoint, it’s a remarkable opportunity to study how consumers behave when the climate swings from “clear and sunny” to a “major storm.”

While a few major themes emerged that were expected (e.g., many consumers have reduced discretionary spending) —there was one new discovery that surprised us. 

A material group of customers, in every data set we evaluated across categories, price points, and brands –continued to spend, and in many cases increased spending. When we went all the way back to 2008, the same population had the same behavior.

While this cohort spent consistently in prior periods,  these unique customers had a heterogeneous composition, or “customer genome” markedly different in every dataset even though spending velocity, frequency and customer value were consistently high. 

We called this cohort “All Weather Customers.”  These aren’t just good customers, these are customers that spend more even when most don’t spend. 

When we shared the study with brands, the only question as “where did they come from, and how do we get more of them?”

 If Brands don’t have not stopped spending, shouldn’t sales be largely unchanged?  Not necessarily –as the larger cohort of lower quality customers do cut back or stop spending altogether.  Moreover in challenging periods, many marketers make a quiet and predictable return to the familiar, but flawed, “tough times” playbook.  The results of which are equally predictable. 

• Cut investment in new customer acquisition. “Its too expensive.”

   

• Then, reactively try and make up the revenue by increasing email frequency. “We have to, for now.”

   

• Next, substantially ignore the relevancy of communications. “A discount is faster.”

   

• Ramp up discounting, in response to falling response. “We need revenue now.”
  

• Finally, when things inevitably  improve,  stop discounts, tanking sales. “We need full price buyers.”

The “Spending Has Stopped” Confirmation Bias

Unfortunately,  its a small subset of your customers today that produce most of your sales.  The majority aren’t buying. This consistently creates a “confirmation bias”  –it “confirms” that the brand simply cannot sell like they “used to,” and that new customer acquisition can only be more expensive and difficult now. 

This bias, however, ignores the existence of and strategy for thriving by acquiring the All Weather Customer.

This rarefied All Weather Customer has good credit and plenty of it. While many are affluent, All Weather Customers are not rich, they span from middle income to wealthy. 

Their income is generally above their standard of living, and the have less dependents on average and they are not a “fringe” group nor a small population.

The United States consistently has tens of millions of them, in various age groups, and income/affluence brackets. 

The smart money is already, currently and actively exploiting new ways to acquire new, incremental All Weather Customers —when media costs are substantially lower.  Media too has “recession pricing.”

The All Weather Customer Strategy works by compounding the performance of lower cost media, and acquiring not just customers, but the highest value, highest potential customers for each given brand, category, product, and price point.

But how does an organization acquire this uniquely valuable type of Customer?  

If you’ve been underwhelmed with your agencies, its understandable –customer acquisition is and has always been hard. Agencies, even the top firms, don’t have an answer beyond getting creative right, website right, and buying as smart as they can. 

It’s just not good enough. You need an “unfair” information advantage –so seven years ago, we partnered with a startup to leverage our analytics bench, and massive client data to create one… that was hard too.

Today we have access to live data on enough brands, to know that your existing e-commerce customers are most likely fading in spending, and your new customer acquisition is rather expensive. This same data has also shown us that certain rarified customers are still spending. 

The secret is not just adding customers, or even adding customers inexpensively  ―-its acquiring the rarefied “All Weather” Customer. One who spends more and spends more often in every environment… sunny days or the worst storm your business has to operate in.

All Weather Customer Aquisition’s Performance shines brightest among storm clouds.

We know you’re rather unlikely to try anything new unless it’s essentially risk-free, even if that is not a realistic expectation of a marketing service provider.

Our proprietary customer acquisition solution has proven to be so consistently effective –that we’ll guarantee we outperform your benchmarks in 30 days, or we’ll give you your money back. 

Talk to us, and learn see how we can take you from benchmarking your existing customer acquisition performance to All Weather Customer Out-Performance in 60 days or less.  Outperform now, and scale up when your ready.