And they still believe that the more people you
expose this memorable message to the better chance
you have of winning over customers. It sounds
reasonable; it sounds logical; but it no longer works.
A New Process for Marketing
Future-marketing relies on a process that is perhaps
its exact opposite. It says forget broad appeal; forget
measuring the impact of an advertisement on the
average person, even an average person in your
target market. It says build your entire business
around only one single customer. Adapt all of your
processes, train all of your people and develop all
of your technology to satisfy only one customer—
and forget the rest.
This is a challenging mindset to adopt. Most of
modern business analytics are built on statistical
analysis. But, statistical analysis holds no value
using this approach. Forget sampling campaign
response because the opinion of the masses is
unimportant. Consider all of the customers you’ve
recently sold to. None of them matter—only one of
them.
Who is this magical customer? It is your one most
profitable customer. The one customer that has
generated the most profit for your organization
during recent periods, or the one customer that has
the highest CLV. This one customer is the
cornerstone upon which all of your marketing, sales
and operational processes should be built. And this
is meant literally. No other customer matters, only
this one. You must adopt this mindset literally,
because without complete commitment you will
always have the tendency to shift back to an
“averages” mindset, and with it will come average
performance.
From this starting point—your one most profitable
customer—all of your processes can be reexamined.
You can chart every interaction this one person had
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Strictly Marketing Magazine March/April 2016
with your organization from the moment you first
touched them, when you determined they had a
need or became a prospect, until they were
converted to a customer, and then when they were
cross-sold or up-sold (the seven critical touch
points).
What this analysis will reveal is the perfect pattern
of interactions that produced that perfect customer.
Your task is then simple: go get more exactly like
him or her. Or, more accurately you should do two
things: 1) go find more exactly like this perfect
customer and put them through the same perfect
process, and 2) mold all of the consumers that you
encounter to this perfect pat tern because this pattern
will produce the best, most tangible results.
But in truth, it isn’t just one customer. It is the
perfect customer within each target market, or the
one that purchased the fastest, or the one that has
the highest CLV. And therefore it follows that it
isn’t just one pattern.