Show, Don’t Tell
Let’s say you are the marketer of an ecommerce brand. You have two options.
Option 1
- Keep spending 85-90% of your marketing budget on new customer acquisition (with half of it being wasted on wrong acquisition and reacquisition and CAC rising 40-50% year-over-year)
- Not fix the broken customer experience on your website/app arising out of poor catalog data and silo-ed interaction data resulting in sub-optimal relevance and omnichannel personalization
- Not create differentiated and delightful experiences for your correctly identified 20% Best customers who account for 60% of revenue and 200% of profits
- Continue to be over-reliant on web/app for conversion, accept attention recession on push channels, and miss out on new super-effective funnels
- Live with less happy customers, hyper-competition, and lower or no profits
Option 2
- Do the opposite of Option 1 choices, thus transforming broken customer moments into beautiful experiences, and creating the ultimate business moat by maximising industry profits (what I term as ProfitXL).
What do you choose?
The answer is of course obvious. The challenge is how to bring this to life? Because for ProfitXL to work, it is not just adopting a single point solution, but instead buying into a system which inverts the funnel by making the Best customers as the priority and ensuring that paid new customer acquisition is the last resort.
This is the conundrum I have been working on for the past few months. My natural approach is to show the power of the products we build, rather than present the problem first. For ProfitXL to succeed, I will have to make the problem visible and then talk about the system which leads to the solutions. In fact, more than talk, I realised I have to “show”.
As I was pondering about this, my mind went to the Broadway shows I have seen. No written description can do justice to the experience of being there in person and watching the live action take place on the stage. The constraints of space are blown away by the ingenuity of the show creators. For a couple of hours that a typical play lasts, the audience is transported into a different world of action, dialogue and music – happening right in front. “Hamilton” transported me back to the America of the late 1700s, while “Some Like It Hot” took me back in time a hundred years to the Prohibition Era.
The question that I started to think about: could I create a (virtual) Broadway-like show to persuade decision-makers about the power of the ProfitXL system, and thus create a “landing idea” before the product-centric “land-and-expand” approach kicks in? I decided to ask ChatGPT.