This will only hurt for a moment.

This just in… There are no silver bullets that will transform your business from bad to good or good to great. There is no single solution, nor is there a best of breed suite of solutions. The King Kong Agency isn’t going to all of a sudden hockey stick your revenue as much as Sabri Suby wants you to think so. 

Your circumstance—you being CEO’s, founders, CMO’s (especially CMO’s), COO’s, Chief Revenue Officers, CFO’s, Chief Experience Officers, PE portfolio managers, eCom managers, Product leads, CD’s, and brand managers—your circumstance isn’t made better by discovering “a” solution, or even a whole host of them. Your circumstance, if you’re not growing as fast as you’d like, not as profitable as you’d like, or worse, neither growing or making money, isn’t solved with “solution providers,” agencies, technologies, techniques, hacks, or ‘common’ practices (The industry calls them best practices, but, by definition, they are common practices because if everyone is doing them, they are not best, they are common).

Do you have to optimize ROAS? Sure. Do you need a CRM system? Yes. Do you need to optimize your SEO, your UX, your perceived product performance, and do you need some hook to hang your brand hat? Yes. Yes to all of it. But when you’re done doing all of that, which you probably have already done a lot of, then what??? What if you’re not hitting the numbers you had hoped for. Or you’re hitting them now but you see the writing on the wall that you won’t be hitting them soon. Is it some world event, a war in the middle east, a weather catastrophe, a cultural upheaval that you feel is putting a ding in, or threatening, your business, perhaps even a pandemic? What if those things keep happening or there’s an economic crisis, how do you survive that? You think a better ROAS, another A/B test, or the latest and greatest email hack is going to pull you through a recession? Nope. 

Here’s the worst news. You’re operating in a commodity market, selling a commodity. Just for kicks, let’s say you’re an apparel manufacturer. Let’s say you’re a surf brand. How many surf brands selling board shorts do you guess there are? Untold is the right answer. What if you’re an organic cosmetic company? The number of competitors in your space is similar to surf brands: UNTOLD numbers. What if you sell coffee, tea, t-shirts, baby clothes, fashion apparel, hair products, appliances, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Good luck. Now, what if 10 of your competitors are PE backed. Which they are. You think Warby Parker got to where they are on sweat alone. Nope. Anyone with an investment partner has cash to build and bolster marketing, product development, inventory, human resources, and the lot. Where are you? You’re left optimizing your ROAS.

STOP seeking solutions. A better brand position, better product, better ROAS, better email performance, better retargeting results, a new path to a look-alike customer via Meta, TikTok, IG, or the next platform or the next. Or, here’s my favorite, you’re going to hire a brand strategy agency to “reposition” your brand. Ha. Reposition? You don’t think the myriad competitors in your space don’t already own every position imaginable??? 

Here’s the rub. You DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT YOUR PROBLEM IS!!!!!! And, unless you’re Apple Computers, with the most cash reserves on the planet built on the most robust repeat purchase phenomena in the history of commerce, you HAVE A PROBLEM. You just don’t know what it is because there isn’t any way to see your problem. No one has walked up to you and thumped you on the forehead and said, “HEY, HERE’s THE PROBLEM!!” Face it, you’re flying blind. You grasp, you re-brand, you optimize, you hire, you squeeze more and more and more out of your existing set of tactical metrics, AOV, CR, ROAS, traffic, etc. GA4 should help. Haha. OMG. No. Stop.

Back to my point… unless you’re Apple, you have a problem. Want to know what it is? You think it’s your website or your brand or your product or your marketing, sales team or your finances? Wrong. None of those things are your problem. 

So, here you sit, a commodity business in a commodity market overwhelmed with solutions promising profits. One by one, try after try, those solutions fall short. The breakthrough performance they promise nets only incremental improvement at best, leaving you back at square one without a clear understanding of how to improve anything or everything mentioned above. 

Want to know your real problem? Want to see what you can’t see? Do you want a diagnosis that hones your resources in on something that will actually move the meter of scale and profit? Sure you do, but you don’t want another platform, you don’t have the budget for it. You already have Peel, RetentionX, Looker, Power BI, Triple Whale, whatever, and none of them has gotten you answers and clarity, so why would this?

Remember back in the day when there were keys to your car, and when you lost your keys, they were always in the last place you looked. Same here. It’s the last place you’ll need to look. Here it is. Here’s what you have not been looking for or looking at. Queue drumroll: the pace, cost, distribution, efficiency, and percentile of customers that go from not buying from you to buying from you on a regular basis. That’s it. That’s what you can’t see. Yeah, you have LTV, but you don’t know how that got created. Yeah, you have CAC, and you have a Klaviyo account that shows you first time buyers and 2nd and 3rd… but you don’t have a relative understanding of how it affects your end profitability based on how good you are at creating a regular buying habit from the batch of customers that you have acquired. You’re blind to the one phenomenon that matters most: HOW GOOD ARE YOU AT CREATING YOUR BEST CUSTOMERS!!!??? 

Tragically, clarity is sitting right beneath your nose, but you don’t see it and therefore, you aren’t managing to it. If we follow a set of Prospects from their first experience with a brand along their journey to what is nirvana in terms of loyal customer behavior—aka multiple buyers in a repeating purchase habit over time—what we witness is dramatic failure (yes, your brand is experiencing this), typically that is, and, let’s emphasize ‘typically.’ Some brands do perform better (like Apple). But those are the exceptions to the rule, not the rule. The rule tells us that of 1M Prospects, only 0.01% ever go on to form meaningful, long-term, buying relationships with the brands that service them. And only 0.006% become regular long-term buyers (aka your best customers). These “best customers” are the most valuable customers. They sustain their purchase habit over time. They recruit from their circle of influence on behalf of your brand. They pay a premium to stay in a relationship with the brand they love (hopefully you). And, they, by far, contribute the most profit. 

Let’s make that math easier. Of 1M Prospects (of which you hope to acquire 1-2% and then feel good about that achievement), ONLY 60 become regular long-term buyers. Yeah, Shopify keeps telling you your “retention rate” is 40%. Bullshit. If it weren’t bullshit then the entire Internet wouldn’t be on sale all the time. Look around, every business is discounting in the desperate hope to get buyers in or get them back. 

We’ve been running these numbers for brands across varying categories for over 20 years. The reality is grim and getting grimmer. Brand switching is a problem for every business and it’s a problem that’s getting bigger day by day. Knowing where the failure points are, when, where, how, and why the switch happens, is the linchpin to combating the problem. 

Here’s how it works. Our data set creates an index integrating thirteen unique points of view assessing how well your brand is getting customers from zero purchases to lots of purchases and lots of purchases over and over again. It’s called The Brand Equity Index! Fancy name, patent pending, proprietary software, all that. What it is monitoring is how fast, how efficient, how frenetic, how consistent, at what percentage, at what cost, and at what value you are creating these long-term buyers, and where the failure points are along that progression, and whether after all of that what the likelihood is those customers will keep on keep’n on buying from you and whether they are willing and able to tell all their friends and family about you… Oh yeah, I forgot. Retaining customers that buy over and over and over again from you has been proven to be the ONLY path to cash, growth, profit. See Apple one more time. What’s on your wrist, in your hand, on your desk? Apple? Yeah. Figured. 

Back to the point. The Brand Equity Index will tell you the health of your brand in terms of creating “best customers.” With it, you will know exactly where to focus your efforts, how to adjust every aspect of your go to market, product presentation, acquisition approach, everything to create best customers. 

Or, you can keep watching your EBITDA shrink and shrink and shrink and curl up in a ball in the corner listening to your advertising agency drone on about how much they’ve improved your ROAS. 

Click here to get started. Enlightenment’s never been so easy.