Customer value
Identify which customers create value, where growth exists and where investment should be prioritised.
Most organisations serve a customer base they inherited rather than one they chose. Value has shifted; the investment pattern often hasn't.
Prioritising the wrong customers is expensive, and slow to show up. It looks like inefficiency long before it looks like a strategy error.
"Our biggest customers are our best customers."
Volume and value diverge more often than not, once cost to serve and discounting are included.
"We need more data."
Usually you need fewer questions, asked more precisely, of the data already sitting in the business.
"Lifetime value is a marketing metric."
It's a capital allocation metric. It should be sitting in front of the board.
Anton's perspective
Data doesn't automatically create insight. Someone has to ask it a good question.
The most valuable output of customer value work is rarely a new segment model. It's the conversation the executive team has when they see, clearly, where the money actually comes from.
Deciding which customers you're not for is one of the hardest and most commercially useful decisions a leadership team can make.
This is the shape of the Front Foot Customer Value Model, the proprietary framework behind this work.
Rebuild the customer view around contribution, not revenue or count.
Segment by what customers do and what that's worth, not by who they are on paper.
Look at which segments are growing, declining or migrating, the trend matters more than the snapshot.
Set acquisition, retention and pricing priorities against that picture.
Free tool
If you want a structured read on where you stand, the Customer Value Diagnostic takes about seven minutes and gives you an immediate, personalised view across five dimensions.
Evidence
Specialty Foods
The top decile of customers was worth more than 40 times the bottom. 59% of app users had never placed an order. We built a three-tier customer marketing framework off that picture.
Phaedon Angelo, Founder, Specialty Foods
Read the full Specialty Foods story →eButcher
The Specialty Foods work surfaced an unserved need. eButcher was spun out of it, local butchers live within 24 hours of signing up, with nothing to pay upfront.
No. Most of this work starts with transaction and CRM extracts. Perfect data infrastructure is a nice-to-have, not a prerequisite.
One built around what customers actually need, do and value, rather than starting from a product, a channel, or an internal assumption about what should work. Understanding which segments create the most value and what drives their decisions should shape positioning, messaging and growth priorities, not the other way round.
Growth usually comes from a small number of customers who create most of the value, not from treating everyone the same. Understanding where that value actually sits, by margin, not just revenue, tells you which audiences to prioritise and where to invest. Chase the wrong customers well and you'll still get the wrong result.
It starts from commercial value rather than description, and it's built to inform investment decisions rather than communications planning.
Understand what is holding growth back and where the greatest opportunities may exist.
Improve measurement and understand marketing's commercial contribution.
Reconnect marketing with commercial objectives and future growth.
No brief required. Start with the situation you're facing.
