Your agency optimizes the campaign. But who optimizes the customer?

It’s REALLY important to understand the process of developing customers from prospects to loyal buyers and take action to move customers through the process 𝘲𝘶𝘪𝘤𝘬𝘭𝘺.

Why? Because customer development drives loyalty and profit. So, it’s critical to have an ascension strategy.

== 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗥𝗢𝗔𝗦 𝗧𝗿𝗮𝗽 ==

Most businesses only seek to generate sufficient ROAS on efforts. This guarantees profit on individual campaigns—that’s halfway toward an actionable outcome.

Does it guarantee profit over time, and yield a healthy brand?

Absolutely not.

All businesses should work diligently to accelerate repurchase and extend customer lifespan. But hey, you won’t hear that from your agencies. (Vendors have an entire ecosystem designed to nudge you down the path that is most beneficial to the vendor business model.)

ROAS tells you whether you acquired the customer efficiently. It doesn’t tell you whether you developed that customer profitably. And the period immediately following that first sale is where much of that value is won or lost.

== 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗪𝗲𝗹𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗲 𝗪𝗶𝗻𝗱𝗼𝘄: 𝗬𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝟴-𝟭𝟮 𝗪𝗲𝗲𝗸 𝗢𝗽𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁𝘂𝗻𝗶𝘁𝘆 ==

The most important stage in the customer journey is the first 8-12 weeks following a first purchase. This window is far more important than any loyalty efforts you might implement.

Customers who purchased 15 days ago are much more likely to repurchase than customers at 90 or 120 days. And the probability of buying increases with each additional purchase.

So, your goal is to work diligently to move a customer from 1x to 2x and 2x to 3x so that *some* customers enter the loyalty stage.

This typically happens after a 4th purchase, when a customer has a 60% or greater chance of purchasing again. That’s the loyalty threshold. Yet most businesses completely squander the welcome stage.

Meanwhile the window to establish a profitable relationship closes.

The more quickly you convert a new customer to a second purchase, the more likely you are of generating profit from the customer over time.

That’s why the smartest companies I work with go “all-in” on converting the first time buyer from a first purchase to a second purchase. They send welcome videos. They ask you to watch an educational video on YouTube. They leverage their email streams. They reach out to customers by phone to see how the item is working out for them. Some share best sellers helping them to cross-purchase in different categories.

This is the period where you can make the BIGGEST difference in the trajectory of your relationship with the customer. And the only realistic chance to convert the customer.

But there needs to be a strong program in place to quickly convert the first-time buyer to a second order, and almost nobody puts in the effort to do this.

One analysis showed lifetime revenue for customers active three to four years was over ten times higher than customers who churned in year one. $1,235 versus $113 in lifetime value.

As marketers, we have an opportunity to develop customers, moving them through the stages of customer development toward loyalty. If you’re not developing customers you are squandering the enormous opportunity.

== 𝗘𝗺𝗮𝗶𝗹 𝗦𝗵𝗼𝘂𝗹𝗱 𝗕𝗲 𝗬𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗣𝗿𝗶𝗺𝗮𝗿𝘆 𝗥𝗲𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀𝗵𝗶𝗽 𝗩𝗲𝗵𝗶𝗰𝗹𝗲 ==

Email marketing should be your primary vehicle for having a relationship with your customer.

Email should generate 30-40% of sales. It’s your best channel for nurturing customers through development stages.

But don’t overlook fulfillment box inserts, outbound calls, and direct mail. These channels deliver surprisingly strong response when deployed strategically.

== 𝗙𝗲𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗙𝘂𝗻𝗻𝗲𝗹 𝗕𝗲𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗦𝗮𝗹𝗲 ==

Developing customers starts well before the sale. Unless you are a startup, you should have feeder programs that create awareness and nurture your customers on a path to a sale. (Paid advertising is not a feeder program.)

Is there a doctor or influencer who can’t stop talking about your product?

A YouTube channel or website dedicated to educating customers?

Blog posts?

Podcasts?

Are you familiar with Life Extension? They have been doing ‘Feeder programs’ for years with their free magazine. Building authority and trust before the sale happens.

Psst…You're actually reading one right now. Substack is a feeder program.

The point is that customer development isn’t a tactic. It’s a relationship strategy. One that begins long before the sale, accelerates immediately after it, and deepens with every interaction and purchase.

And that requires a different way of thinking about where customer value is actually created.

Most brands work relentlessly to improve the economics of acquisition. Far fewer bring that same discipline to what happens after the sale.

Getting the first order is only the beginning. The real opportunity is to move that customer from purchase #1 to #2, from #2 to #3, and ultimately toward loyalty.

Build the feeder programs. Build the welcome sequence. Give customers reasons to learn, to engage, to be entertained and buy again.

The difference between a low-value customer and a high-value customer isn’t just who you acquire. It’s whether you “develop” them once they arrive.

.

One New York professional, for example, has built a large following by posting her intentionally boring evening routines.

They go something like this: She comes home from work, disinfects her shoes, showers, makes dinner, does her skincare, uses her red-light device, practices a little yoga, and watches Netflix with her cat Lucas.

(Then she does some version of it all over again the next night.)

Paulina Cee, better known as @itspaulinacee, belongs to a growing genre of creators whose content revolves around quiet evenings at home, soothing routines, and highly ritualized self-care. Her posts are filled with the small acts that make ordinary life feel intentional: a face mask, a beautifully plated dinner, supplements arranged on a counter, freshly washed sheets, a candle, or a favorite show.

Almost nothing happens.

And that’s precisely why the content works.

The appeal is not really the red-light mask or the skincare serum. In a world of constant stimulation and obligation, consumers are increasingly drawn to small rituals that create a sense of meaning, identity, and control within lives that can feel rushed and overwhelming.

For wellness brands, that distinction has enormous implications.

Modern life moves quickly. We are balancing multiple roles at once, shifting between work, relationships, caregiving, household responsibilities, schedules, notifications, and endless to-do lists. With so little space between obligations, it becomes easy to move through an entire day on autopilot.

A small ritual creates a pause.

It gives people a way to return to the present moment, even briefly, and reconnect with a version of themselves they want to inhabit. The action may be simple, but repetition gives it significance.

This helps explain the appeal of daily-use supplements, body care, and other wellness routines. The opportunity for brands is no longer limited to creating a product with a compelling benefit. It is also about creating something people genuinely look forward to using.

From product to ritual

That is where many newer wellness products differ from traditional offerings.

Bloom didn’t just create another greens formula. It created a colorful drink that gets scooped, mixed, and consumed as part of a daily routine. The brand emphasizes flavor as a way to make consistency easier, encouraging consumers to mix the daily serving with water, juice, or a favorite beverage.

The color matters. So do the taste, texture, aroma, and the vessel sitting on the kitchen counter.

Sensory pleasure can support compliance because it gives the consumer something to anticipate—not just a benefit to remember. When repetition becomes pleasurable, the product can attach itself to a specific moment in the day: the first drink after waking, the afternoon reset, or the post-workout routine.

That is more powerful than simply owning a benefit.

Diptyque builds around the ritual

Luxury fragrance house Diptyque offers an unusually explicit example of this strategy. On September 1, the company launched its first dedicated bath-and-body collection, Les Rituels de Soin.

Rather than presenting the assortment as a collection of unrelated scrubs, oils, lotions, and accessories, Diptyque divided it into two distinct rituals:

Le Matin. Le Soir.

Morning and evening.

That is more than merchandising language. It gives multiple products a reason to coexist.

Diptyque says body care currently represents 5% of its sales and expects that figure to reach approximately 11% following the expansion. Its Americas body-and-hand-care sales rose 34% in 2025 and another 27% during the first six months of 2026, compared with the same period a year earlier.

The broader strategic point, however, is clear: the company is responding to consumers who use different products at different moments of the day—and designing the assortment around those moments.

Wellness brands can borrow that principle without borrowing Diptyque’s luxury aesthetic.

A product line might be organized around:

• Times of day — morning activation, evening wind-down.

• Days of the week — Sunday reset, weekend recovery.

• Seasons — winter immune support, summer hydration, seasonal skin repair.

• Life stages — pregnancy, postpartum, perimenopause, healthy aging.

• Specific occasions — travel, post-workout recovery, stressful workdays.

• Recovery periods — post-surgery support or return-to-routine programs.

• Protocols — a 30-day gut reset or 90-day metabolic program.

• Maintenance — the ongoing routine after the initial intervention.

Starbucks’ Pumpkin Spice Latte is, perhaps, the ultimate example of seasonal of ritual engineering. By limiting its availability, it transformed a simple beverage into a cultural phenomenon that signals the official start of fall—complete with associations, content, rituals and an unofficial “PSL Launch” countdown.

And the ritual appears to have real commercial force. Visits on PSL launch day were 25.7% above Starbucks’ 2026 year-to-date daily average and 35.1% above its average Tuesday., according to Placer.ai.

The lesson for wellness brands is not to manufacture artificial scarcity. It is to recognize that recurring moments can become demand-generating occasions in their own right.

Once a brand owns that ritual, it has permission to extend into the other products that naturally belong there. The expansion feels less like a line extension and more like the completion of a routine the customer already understands.

Ritual as an acquisition engine

There is another advantage that is easy to overlook: rituals are inherently demonstrable.

A bottle of capsules is not particularly interesting content on its own. A morning greens drink is. So is an “everything shower,” a skincare routine, a beautifully arranged sleep ritual, or a Sunday reset.

That helps explain why wellness brands fit so naturally into routine content on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. The product does not need to interrupt the creator’s content because the usage itself becomes the content.

This creates a powerful loop:

1. A brand designs a visually and sensorially distinctive ritual.

2. Customers repeat it.

3. Creators demonstrate it.

4. Other consumers imagine themselves doing it.

5. The behavior becomes recognizable.

6. Recognizability strengthens the brand.

7. More customers adopt the ritual.

In the best cases, the product begins to function almost like a prop in a cultural script. It is no longer merely something the customer owns. It becomes part of who she is, how she organizes her day, and the kind of life she wants to make visible.

That may be the real competitive advantage of ritual: it turns consumption into participation.

Winning brands do not simply sell superior products. They create experiences people want to repeat—and put on display.

What’s the incremental value of each product that you create?

Are you even calculating this metric?

The items we sell help dictate how the customer will behave in the future.

In our vertical, certain product categories, like male potency, have notoriously poor back ends. It’s a category that attracts low-value customers who have low lifetime values.

If an offer causes a customer to purchase less often in the future, you want to de-emphasize the item—because it produces customers who spend less in the future.

Here is what a product that generates value looks like:

One of my Superhits was a consistently strong acquisition performer and driver of new customers.

It was also a solid performer in terms of repeat buying (with 50% of first-time buyers repurchasing).

On average, these buyers spent $142 on their first purchase… and then sought out other, out-of-category items from the brand.

Here’s how those numbers broke down:

29% rebought the original product only

30% rebought the original product plus something different

41% repurchased something different

So, 71% of the repurchasers are grazing from a larger assortment.

Why does this matter?

Because multiple category buyers tend to be more loyal/valuable.

Those additional items were purchases that wouldn’t have otherwise happened, incremental to the customer and to the business.

The *right* products can impact two important aspects of our customer file:

1. The number of new customers

2. The quality of customers

Looking at your business, are there certain categories that cause customers to migrate to other categories?

Is the downstream spend (and repurchase) better in certain acquisition categories?

When you are running the right merchandising analyses, you will understand how winning products and categories “cause” customers to be more valuable… which causes a ton of profit to be generated.

And this strategy applies to channels and content too.

So make sure you are developing products and content that cause customers to spend more (not less) in the future.

Women are built completely different.

Different hormones. Different metabolic demands. Different recovery needs.

And when you add children? Everything changes again.

Oh sure. We have female biohackers like Kayla Barnes-Lentz. The 30-something “longevity expert”. 😂

Her protocol, as she published it in 2024:

1. 35 supplements

2. 10,000 steps/day

3. Intermittent fasting (stop eating at 5:30)

4. PEMF mats

5. Red light therapy

6. Cold therapy

7. Hyperbaric Oxygen therapy

8. Stem cell therapy

9. Sauna

10. Exosomes

11. IV therapies

12. Peptides

13. Sleeps in an EMF-blocking cage

[Side note: She’s since moved off the fasting and rebranded around female-specific research. Fine. The rest still costs more than most women make.]

This isn’t a longevity routine—it’s a luxury escape from aging, sold to people who fear it the most.

Kayla’s approach markets the idea that aging is a disease you can outspend, out-track, and out-hack. But that mindset breeds anxiety, not vitality.

It turns wellness into a never-ending to-do list and weaponizes bio-tech as status.

Let’s face it: this isn’t practical.

Most of us work until 6pm, then start dinner. Many of us also have children to feed, care for, and put to bed.

We can’t stop eating at 4 or 5:30pm or get up and go straight to the gym in the morning.

We want to look and feel good but have practical boundaries of work, family (and $).

Extremism isn’t a flex. Perpetual optimization is itself suboptimal when it creates a life stripped of pleasure and human imperfection.

Real longevity isn’t about clinging to youth, it’s about aging with grace, strength, and simplicity.

You don’t need PEMF mats and oxygen chambers.

You need sleep, connection, purpose, and real nutrition—not extreme protocols.

The Opportunity

On the spectrum of wellness, most brands are speaking to the optimized elite.

edition+partners called this the Wellness Anarchist — people who want the tools without joining a cult. They argue the category needs its Liquid Death: a brand that strips out both the sanctimony of high performance and the aspiration of athleisure in favor of something more honest (and perhaps irreverent).

They’re right that the middle is unserved. But their version still needs a free Saturday night.

The woman I’m describing doesn’t need permission to indulge. She needs a protocol that allows leisure, spontaneity and indulgence.

The message isn’t to “live forever,” but to make whatever time she has worth living.

The digital bros call it a “hack.”

For instance, you notice a water stain on your ceiling after heavy rain.

Should you call a plumber?

No! I’m sure there is a hack out there to solve the problem.

You search YouTube and Reddit.

There is some guy named @DIYDave who says “trust me.” You just need to climb up there with a tube of roof sealant, and smear it over the problem area.

“Works every time,” says @DIYDave.

Turns out, it does not work every time.

Next rainstorm, the leak is worse — now it’s coming through the wall too.

You know what you do next?

You call a roofer.

But now the damage is twice as bad.

It’s the same in business.

When sales are down, it’s almost always a merchandising problem.

But marketing is teeming with tech bros selling “hacks” and fake solutions to real problems.

They’ve got funnels, automations, segmentation magic, and a playbook filled with “trust me” tactics.

But you know what? If the merchandise isn’t right — if the stuff itself doesn’t resonate — nothing else will matter.

Every thriving business has winning items.

They’re the things customers love, and cause them to repeat purchase.

But winning items don’t appear by accident — they’re discovered because companies invest in building and introducing new items.

That’s exactly how you learn what wins. When a business stops launching new items, it slowly decays. Over time, it might look like this:

• 2020 = $7.00 million.

• 2021 = $5.60 million.

• 2022 = $4.48 million.

• 2023 = $3.58 million.

• 2024 = $2.87 million.

• 2025 = $2.29 million.

Items are in a continual state of erosion. Yep, just like creative.

The average decay rate in my projects is between 10% and 30%. Those are big numbers!

To offset the decay, we need a steady diet of new/winning items.

Of course, that doesn’t happen if the tactician “leader” surrounds himself with tactician specialists. The SEO wizard, the PPC expert, the email marketing guy, the social media expert, the killer copywriter, the CRO marketing guru.

Most tacticians will mistakenly always recommend their area of expertise.

When asked how to get more customers, guess what the SEO guy says? SEO!

Guess what the PPC expert says? PPC!

The email marketing guy?

Well, you get the idea.

Sure, you can polish your website, tweak your emails, spend more on ads, or shout louder on social media.

But that’s like plugging your roof when what you really need is a professional.

Thriving brands are built on products people love.

Think Levi’s 501s. Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Latte. Ray-Ban sunglasses. Nike Air Force 1. The Big Mac. Hermes Birkin. Athletic Greens AG1. The Stanley Quencher.

These beloved ‘Hero Products’ are the top 10%- 20% of your assortment that generate the lion’s share of your demand.

They don’t just sell units; they influence culture and create fandoms.

Merchandise excellence > marketing excellence.

Most CEOs don’t know much about the business impact of excellent merchandise.

How could they? Very few companies are smart enough to create their own reporting to measure merchandise productivity.

Which is wild.

Because if your business is getting smaller, you need to ask yourself: Is it a Merchandise Productivity problem or a Customer Acquisition problem?

New + Reactivated customers are supremely important. But if you are a CMO worth your chops, you spend a disproportionate amount of time focusing on two things.

1. Introducing new items and promoting them so they have a chance to become winners.

2. Promoting winners to squeeze as much profit out of your customer as possible.

New items are critical to the future success of your business. And the items you introduce in 2026 will directly affect your ability to be successful in 2027 and 2028.

In the majority of my projects, there is a serious product issue holding the company back.

Usually the marketing team is blamed, and the blame leads to all sorts of reckless behavior—from overspending on Meta to 50% off plus free shipping, to just about any marketing mistake you can possibly think of.

None of that fixes the real problem.

There are no hacks.

Everything worthwhile is hard.

7% falls somewhere in the middle.

And perhaps 3% is genuinely great.

When it comes to professional excellence, drive matters. Of course it does.

But exceptional work also takes judgment. Taste. Pattern recognition. Originality. Killer instincts.

And most of that cannot be taught.

Ever read copy written by Jim Rutz? Gary Bencivenga? Chris Haddad? Eric Betuel?

These writers have what I call ‘flair.’

What does that mean? They have a distinctive voice and personality that is almost impossible to clone.

You start reading their copy and you cannot stop. It isn’t just persuasive—it is fun to read..

“Limo Larry and Champagne Cherie” was an enormous Rutz winner for what was the largest circulation consumer newsletter in America at the time: Bottom Line/Personal.

When you look at it, you have no idea how came up with the concept or the execution. His copy was unforgettable and hard to replicate. All you could do was sit back and marvel at the craftsmanship.

Back at Phillips Publishing, we mailed Jim Rutz and Gary Bencivenga controls to the tune of 20 million pieces each (probably more …could have easily been 30 million…or more).

Jim sometimes charged a non-refundable $100,000 as an upfront fee in lieu of royalties. And sometimes his packages bombed!

My friend and longtime copy associate Peter Betuel (Eric’s brother) said something to me years ago that stuck:

“Flair cannot be taught.”

There are marketing things that are somewhat easy to learn: basic formulas, offer structures, and hook templates.

But flair? It is scarce, impossible to teach, and certainly can’t be prompted in an LLM.

The whole point of this post is that you can love marketing, business, and your craft with absolute obsession. You can dissect the legends with religious dedication.

But I’m not convinced every mediocre performer is secretly exceptional and just needs to “try harder.”

The top 3% are rare precisely because excellence is rare.

You can sniff out bad storytelling in two seconds. It’s clear who’s using AI to write, and you know it the minute you see it.

AI has a structure that is synthetic and inauthentic. It’s obvious. It’s bad storytelling.

To have any chance of penetrating through the AI slop, you need to create truly exceptional content. That’s why tech companies are hiring writers who can tell differentiated stories that sound NOTHING like AI and break through the noise.

AI writes to be useful. The human author writes to be visceral.

“Useful” writing is now a free commodity.

It’s forgettable.

And it’s everywhere.

“Visceral” writing— the kind that stops a scroll, the kind that lingers, the kind that comes from lived experience and human insight — is now a high-value asset.

And guess what? Visceral writing is the kind machines CANNOT reverse-engineer.

And that’s why:

• The number of job postings mentioning ‘storyteller’ doubled last year — 50,000 in marketing, 20,000 in media and comms

• Netflix opened up a tech comms role that pays $775,000 and OpenAI and Anthropic are paying up to half a million dollars in total comp for content and comms roles

• GAP is hiring Chief Entertainment Officers to develop original shows

• Andreessen Horowitz launched its New Media team to turn their founders into storytellers and “win the narrative battle online.”

Tech is often a leading indicator of what we see in other industries. Tech companies have adopted AI quickly, but they’re also quick to see the downside of the technology—that producing generic AI content is useless.

And so, they’re pivoting.

Storytelling is now a CEO-level initiative. The people who can sit next to the CEO, craft the narrative, and build the system that spreads it across the org... those are the people getting paid.

In a competitive market, a founder who is a “storyteller” has a massive advantage.

The floor has been raised for everyone.

But the ceiling still belongs to HUMANS.

Nine times out of ten, it’s actually an economics and positioning problem. The best creative and lowest CPMs in the world cannot compensate for an offer that lacks margin headroom, broad market appeal, and backend monetization depth.

If scaling feels like an uphill battle right now, run your product through this 9-point diagnostic.

9 DTC Product Attributes that Make Paid Customer Acquisition Nearly Impossible:

1. <$50 AOV (unless LTV or subscription play)

2. Less than 70% gross margins

3. Commodity products with no differentiated positioning, unique mechanism or sufficient reasons to believe

4. Products with no repeat or back-end monetization opportunity such as subscription, upsell and/or related product cross-sells

5. Products appealing to a narrow universe rather than a broad, durable addressable market

6. Products with only one viable message and no meaningful avatar or use-case expansion

7. Products competing in Stage 5 market sophistication with a Stage 1 claim, and no credible way to introduce a new mechanism or reset the conversation

8. Products without a compelling enough offer or incentive to encourage customer trial (weak perceived value)

9. Saturated categories where you have no strategy for breaking through

After 20+ years of helping scale brands to eight figures, I’ve learned that when businesses are stuck, the real problem is often further upstream than the copy or media buying.

The product itself needs enough economic headroom, demand breadth, strategic differentiation and monetization depth in order to scale.