Deb Rapacz

If you are about to invest a single minute of time or dollar of your budget on someone who is not, or cannot become, one of your Top Shoppers, STOP!

The most valuable segment your brand has is the relatively small set of buyers who deliver the majority of revenue and profit. For most consumer brands, about 30 percent of consumers typically represent 70 percent of annual sales. Top Shoppers are a brand’s core. Focusing on the acquisition, development and retention of Top Shoppers will help a brand grow faster and more profitably, year after year.

How well do you know your Top Shoppers?
No savvy marketers would claim they undervalue their heavy buyers. Yet, I find it surprising how many brands cannot provide an in-depth picture of these buyers and how their brand is performing with this segment. Next-generation Shopper Marketers will clearly understand the three levels of benefits their Top Shoppers deliver to their brand: Brand Economics, Brand Insights...

Is The Body Shop’s Relationship Marketing effort slowly killing the brand’s equity? It is for me.

See, I want to believe that The Body Shop has great products that are special and worth every bit of what I pay. It’s why I started buying their products in the first place. I suppose in some way I want to feed my own sense of self-indulgence and self-worth. I enjoy discovering products that are unique and really work for me. I know I feel good about supporting a company that has earth-friendly, people-friendly, animal-friendly practices. And whenever I think of adding “The Body Shop” to my errand list for more Body Butter, more Hemp Hand Protector for my husband, or new make-up for my daughter, I don’t want to worry about whether I remembered the coupons, or if it’s going to be on sale.

However, being a member of the Love Your Body Rewards Club enhances very few of these feelings.

Instead, I’m bombarded by promotionally-based, time-sensitive emails...

When our weight-loss packaged-goods client was preparing to develop a new primary advertising campaign, we encouraged the management team to step back and take an isolated look at just the company's highest-purchasing consumers. Our goal was to have the client acquire more of the "right" prospects who would use more of the product and stick with the brand longer and more exclusively. The brand had recently lost significant momentum in attracting new heavy buyers.

Using household panel data (the tracking of purchases of hundreds of thousands of households supplied by companies like Nielsen and IRI), we created an initial view of the demographic, attitudinal and behavioral breakdowns of the brand's heaviest buyers. The difference between the heaviest consumers and the average consumers was eye-opening.

Executives had always described their target in line with their average consumer. This was a younger woman with 20 to 30 pounds to lose. She worked, most likely in...