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ButcherBox is an online meat-seller that’s absolutely killing it in the industry. But unlike Blue Apron, ButcherBox did something a little different — and this little difference made a huge difference in the long run. Rather than focusing on acquiring new customers in their marketing campaigns, they targeted existing/past subscribers and website visitors to get them to keep coming back, order more and more, and stay for good. Let’s take a look at how this company avoided coming face to face with the same issues as other companies in the industry.

Most people attributed the fall of Allbirds to poor quality, but the truth is, the source of their problems was more than just the material of the shoe. Allbirds, originally a sustainable sneaker company, had not only failed to pay attention to the underlying needs and values of their ICP, but had also lost its way by attempting to expand the brand to irrelevant segments. Much like what we described for Nike, trying to enter new markets too quickly fogged up Allbirds’ core brand image and diminished overall perceived quality. But even this is too short a summary of what truly happened to Allbirds — so let’s break it all down.

In addition to high consumer spending, the customer acquisition landscape was quite different from what it is today - platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram offered clever segmentation tactics to target customers effectively, which gave these companies comparatively lower customer acquisition cost (CAC) than they had seen in the past. If you’ve been operating a business, you’ve got a plethora of data that you can use to your advantage. Here are some ways that our customers have seen growth from their existing customer base.

One of the most common challenges we see retail and ecommerce businesses experience is their inability to sustain their initial momentum. I mentioned this idea very briefly at the end of our Glossier case study, but in this case, Glossier lost its reputation due to bad HR and internal operational decision-making. More often than not, though, brands cannot maintain their brand image or awareness because of rigid, inflexible marketing strategies. That’s why we’re going to dive deep into Pokémon GO and how it went from having over 200m active players at its peak to there now only being 80m remaining.

There has been a lot of talk of building 'data apps' on the modern data stack. It's not clear who exactly is to be blame but it may be Martin Casado [1] and Benn Stancil [2]. But what does it even mean to build a data app? Are there any benefits or downsides? What are the technical challenges? I think the proposition is interesting... but these are tough questions we must answer if the concept is to be taken seriously.

The beer industry is one where people either care deeply about the brand they consume or don’t care at all. For the folks who do care, there’s a set of criteria they typically use to decide which beer to purchase: quality, taste, price, brand image, tradition, and authenticity. For Mountain Man Lager, it was clear that they absolutely nailed every one of those factors. For nearly a century, Mountain Man never once deviated from its core identity as a family-owned quality beer brand with a consistently strong, bitter recipe and a local bond to East Coast consumers. So when Mountain Man Lager suddenly started to consistently lose 2% of its revenue every year, Chris Prangel, the next inheritor of the family-owned brand, began to panic. For over 75 years, Mountain Man never once saw a decline in sales - so there was clearly a reason to be concerned. But what exactly happened?

LTV is one of those concepts that can easily be understood at surface level but often misunderstood at its core. But what exactly makes it so difficult to grasp? 1. LTV is hard to calculate, and nobody knows what to do with it. 2. There’s no way easy way to use it to measure growth. 3. Fixing (1) and (2) is much easier said than done.

Realistic movies are usually comedic and dramatic spins of real life, but if you’ve ever watched “The Devil Wears Prada,” you’ll know the film has quite accurately captured how intense and almost cultish the fashion and beauty industry can be. Glossier’s rise to fame, though, is largely attributed to its defiance of this cultural mindset. But it’s a little ironic - Glossier set out to escape from the echo chamber of the beauty industry, yet its own customer base is known for being extremely obsessed with the brand. Let’s dive deeper into what exactly triggered Glossier’s explosive takeover.

RFM is a customer segmentation methodology for e-commerce businesses. The insight behind this framework is that customers who purchased recently are more likely to purchase again. Equally, big and frequent spenders are more likely to respond to promotions than small and infrequent spenders. Together, the three metrics give you a way to create lifecycle segments that let you answer questions like: Who are my best customers? Which customers am I at risk of losing? Which customers are best to target with promotions? Which customers can I entice to spend more?

I’ve been a proud Spotify user since 2015 and have never reverted to another music streaming platform since then. There’s a reason Spotify is so skilled at converting customers into premium users and retaining them. Being a music platform, Spotify has mastered the art of personalization. However, what truly differentiates them from the competition is the way they manage to personalize both individual user experiences on the platform and the marketing content every user receives.

The problem we see with most brands is that they take an “everything to everyone” approach to retention marketing, which means they try to appeal to all their customers with the same generic campaigns and messages, rather than tailoring their marketing efforts to specific customer segments. We find that this approach leads to poor engagement and low retention rates, as folks aren’t likely to respond to messages that aren’t tailored to their interests. And thus, we see the importance of segmentation!

Robinhood was the first trading platform of its kind. With its goal to “democratize finance for all,” the platform enabled any user, regardless of financial expertise, to invest in stocks, crypto, options, and more. Of course, any company’s downfall is a result of a combination of multiple factors. But according to Robinhood’s CEO, Vlad Tenev, one of their critical mistakes was assuming that heightened user engagement in the pandemic would continue… post-pandemic.