Five plays your team already runs, and a sixth it was never built for
Read as moves on the table, the work resolves into a small set of plays. Each one is either a climb up a row or a hold against the drift rightward.
- Capture turns anonymous and intermediated buyers into known, reachable customers. It is the on-ramp onto the grid, and everything else depends on it.
- First moves a known customer from nought transactions to one.
- Second moves them from one to two, across the tripling inflection. This is the highest-value single move in consumer marketing.
- Repeat keeps the best customers buying, and keeps them in the strong column while they do it.
- Protect pulls drifters back left before their attention is lost — the play that acts on the lead indicator rather than the lagging one.
Those five are the Grow and Protect work your CRM team already does. Agents and in-channel interactivity make every one of them sharper and cheaper to run, but none of them is new, and none of them would be worth an essay on its own.
They translate cleanly outside commerce, which is worth stating because the vocabulary can sound retail-specific. In banking and insurance: Capture is KYC-complete activation, First is the first product, Second is the second product, Protect is a dormancy early-warning. In telco: First is the first recharge, Second is the second, Protect is the pre-churn signal. Same grid, same plays, different nouns.
The sixth play is different in kind. Recover takes the lost column — the customers whose attention has gone dark entirely. Nobody owns it, and that is not an accident. A CRM team is built and measured to keep the engaged engaged. The lost are always next quarter’s problem, so they are never worked. They fall through the floor, and the floor they land on is adtech.
Now the concession that sets up everything after it. None of these six plays is clever. Every marketer reading this already knows all of them, has known them for years, and could have written the list unaided. Which raises the only interesting question in the essay: if the plays are obvious and the money is enormous, why is none of this being done?
Five plays climb the rows and hold the columns. The sixth wins back the customers everyone else has given up on.
