Decoding your superfans and distractors to unlock an unfair marketing advantage

Just about every brand will answer “yes” to both questions. I categorize these consumers into two groups: superfans and distractors.

Some brands are built wholly around their superfans, for example:

• Disney’s superfans make pilgrimages to Disneylands around the world, eagerly collect merchandise, and subscribe to Disney+ …

On the flip side, distractors can cause significant financial headaches. For example:

• In [one] earnings report, ASOS acknowledged that 6% of its active consumers had cost the company >$100 million. The brand loses over $6 every time one of these distractors places an order. …

I have not worked with any of these brands mentioned above, but I believe the statistical distribution of their superfans and antifans roughly follows a bell curve that will be more or less the same for every business:

Your superfans are at one end. They constitute approximately 10% of your overall customer base and have an outsized positive influence on your bottom line. They make frequent purchases across your entire product range. They exhibit low return rates, almost never complain, and are always recommending you to friends and family.

Your distractors are at the other. Also making up around 10% of your customer base, these malcontents don’t actually care for your brand all that much and often wind up costing you money. They sporadically buy from you. … They are quick to make returns, bog down your support staff with trivial issues, and leave bad reviews.

And falling in between is your “core middle.” Your earnings from them are satisfactory. They’re valuable enough to keep around but are not particularly exciting. Likewise, they are not particularly excited about your brand.

Truly consumer-obsessed marketing requires knowing your superfans and distractors inside-out. …

Constant efforts to gain an in-depth knowledge of who your superfans are and what they’re all about are a key factor for getting  properly obsessed with them and unlocking that seemingly “unfair” advantage to grow faster than competitors despite shrinking resources.

And when you identify your antifans, you’ll know [who]to get rid of early and often.

Don’t bother making significant efforts to understand your core middle in as much detail. The idea here is simply to keep the status quo. You won’t dominate your category by focusing on them.

Lose your distractors and keep your superfans with a profit-optimized marketing funnel

A comprehensive understanding of your superfans and distractors enables you to build a marketing funnel that accounts for actual profit generated by customers. That’s a far superior metric to optimize around in comparison to cost per acquisition … or customer lifetime value.

Here’s how you do it:

1. Minimize your budget spent on your distractors. They will fall off organically.
2. Make no changes to what you’re spending on your core middlers.
3. Ramp up your budget for your superfans. Aim for “surround sound” marketing that will keep them in the funnel.

The result will be a more profitable funnel. As your distractors disappear and your superfan conversion rate increases, the relative proportion of superfans will increase at every stage.

To execute this approach, you’ll need good integration of analytics and media.

• With analytics, your goal should be to nail down descriptions of both your superfans and distractors in as much detail as you can.
• With media, your goal should be to create the conversion rate-boosting “surround sound” that maximizes your funnel’s effectiveness.
• Integration of analytics and media is crucial. They work best in symbiosis. You need good analytics for good media, and you need good media for good analytics. They are the Yin and Yang of efficiency and effectiveness together make for an “unfair” marketing advantage.