Customer Acquisition & Retention Marketing

The mistake almost everyone makes

Companies come to this conversation with a channel question. Should we be on TikTok. Is our Google spend working. Do we need a new agency.

Those are the third question, not the first. The first is what a customer is worth over what horizon at what margin, and therefore what you can afford to pay to acquire one. The second is whether your measurement is capable of telling you what you’re currently paying. Most companies cannot answer either, and every channel decision made without them is a guess wearing a spreadsheet.

On one engagement with a $135M retailer, building the model surfaced that the business had been planning against an in-store average purchase value of $1,796 when the real number was $1,360. Nobody had questioned it in years. It had propagated into every forecast, every channel target and every agency brief in the building.

What we do

Model the economics. Contribution margin by cohort, payback period, the honest version of lifetime value rather than the one that assumes nobody churns. This is where engagements start.

Audit the measurement before trusting a number. Attribution is usually broken in ways that systematically flatter whoever built it. We look at the serving and tracking layer directly. Prove was moving clients to first-party ad serving years before the cookie collapse forced the industry to, for exactly this reason: if the data is wrong at the source, every optimisation downstream inherits the error.

Build the persuasion architecture. Not personas — a matrix mapping the states of mind a buyer actually occupies to the places they already are, the thing that would move them at each point, and the content that does it. This is the artefact clients keep.

Sequence the layers. Analytics, call tracking, SEO, paid search and retargeting first. Then landing page optimisation, content, capture and lifecycle email. Then conquesting, media and social. Then partnerships and outreach. Clients almost always want to start three layers up because that layer feels like marketing. Starting there is how a company spends two million dollars and cannot say what it bought.

Make little bets. Launch fast, test variations, kill failures quickly, systematically fold the wins back in. Ramp up rather than big-bang.

The agency question

I founded a performance agency, ran it for a decade with enterprise healthcare, energy and retail clients, and wound it down. So when a client asks whether their agency is doing good work, I know precisely where the bodies are usually buried — which reports are constructed to look like performance, which fees are defensible, which activity is real and which is billable motion.

That audit is frequently the highest-return four weeks a company can buy. Sometimes the answer is that the agency is good and the brief is bad, which is also worth knowing.

Where we are strongest

Ecommerce and DTC, healthcare and regulated categories where half the ad platforms won’t take your money, automotive retail, and B2B where the sale is long and the attribution is genuinely hard.