Who Really Lost Your Customers?
In my previous essay, “Who Lost My Customers and Killed My Profits?“, I confronted an uncomfortable truth that shook my own foundation. For years, I’d crusaded against the $500 billion AdWaste plague—the staggering burn of marketing budgets on reacquiring customers brands already knew. I’d positioned Google and Meta as the villains, extracting their “revenue tax” every time brands needed to find lost customers.
Then Laura Ries’s “The Strategic Enemy” forced me to reconsider everything. Her thesis: breakthrough companies succeed not by being better, but by defining and defeating a strategic enemy. This made me ask: what does Netcore—or any Martech company—truly stand against?
The answer was devastating: Traditional Martech is the Profit Bleeding Machine.
This isn’t contrarianism; it’s mathematics. The Best-rest-Test-Next (BRTN) framework reveals the truth: 20% Best customers generate 60% of revenue, 40% Rest customers contribute 30%, and 40% Test customers (dormant or churned) account for just 10%.
Here’s what Traditional Martech (TradMartech) actually does:
- Serves the loyal 20% who’d buy anyway
- Abandons the 80% through generic broadcasts
- Loses their lifetime value as they drift away
- Then forces brands to pay more to reacquire them
Consider what a Rest customer experiences: ” I bought twice, loved the product, but you treat me exactly like someone who’s never heard of you. Same generic emails and WhatsApps. Same irrelevant offers. I’m not a person to you—I’m just row 47,293 in your database.”
I bought twice, loved the product, but now I’m just another email address in your database. Your messages don’t remember my journey. Why should I remember you?”
The Triple Failure of TradMartech:
- Failed Economics: Charges for messages sent and active base, not outcomes achieved—profits whether retention works or not
- Failed Engagement: 80% of customers ignored while obsessing over the 20% who would buy anyway
- Failed Personalisation: Millions reduced to “Women 25-34″—that’s segmentation, not personalisation
The mathematics are brutal. A D2C brand with 100,000 customers:
- 20,000 Best customers: Served well, keep buying
- 40,000 Rest customers: Slowly disengaging, ignored
- 40,000 Test customers: Already gone, unreachable
TradMartech monetises the 20,000. Adtech monetises the 80,000. It’s a parasitic relationship where TradMartech creates the leak, then brands pay AdTech to refill the bucket.
This is the double whammy brands face:
- Loss #1: Customer lifetime value vanishes (lost revenue)
- Loss #2: Pay to reacquire them (AdWaste tax)
Martech isn’t fighting AdWaste—it’s feeding it. The Profit Bleeding Machine creates systematic customer abandonment, then charges brands for the transfusion.
The enemy isn’t Google or Meta—they’re just opportunists. The real enemy is the Martech stack, the Profit Bleeding Machine that loses customers by design, not by accident.
