Cycles

Here is the essential difference between men and women: my male blogging friend turns out a good blog every few days; I turn out 12 decent blogs over a 2-day period every 28 days. His production process is better in so many ways; he is able to produce during downtimes, on planes, at (his kids) hockey practice, where I wallow in airport lounges eating chex party mix and flipping through in-flight magazines.  That is, until I time comes. Then I’m up in the morning before the children, sitting in a noisy bar, waiting in my car at the pickup line, tap, tap tapping away.  It is fantastic.  The prospect of menopause keeps me up at night.  I envision ending my creative life on a flat, long, runway, taxiing toward a horizon that is, indeed, the edge of the world.  In the meantime I plan my life around my monthly ups and downs, taking full advantage of every hormonally-induced personality transformation.  When I can write, I write.  When I can’t, I clean up, I organize, I plan. I work out. I eat chex party mix.

And what does menopause have to do with marketing? It reminds us of the crucial importance of cycles.  Of course, the c-word has been beaten to death in the past six months.  But everybody insists on talking about the wrong types of cycles.  All we hear about is the movements of objects and institutions: business cycles, production cycles, economic cycles, product life cycles.  We forget that the concept of cycles is, at its root, biological.  Not just seasonal; I’m not talking about black Friday or Mother’s Day. I’m talking cell-based blood-and-hormones biology.  The cycles of the living, breathing, consumer. Why is it that every MBA knows all about product “life-cycles” but doesn’t know the ups and downs of their own customer base? How did General Motors get caught off guard when they found that their loyal but aging Oldsmobile customers were “exiting the market?” Why is that everybody knows the exact date of the end of their selling period but we only date the beginning of the end of our customer relationship in retrospect?

When it comes down to it, the only cycle that really matters is our customer cycle.  Not just the customer life cycle, but that shorter term series of ups and downs that comes with any human relationship.  Our customers’ love for us is not steady; it rises and falls partially based on our performance, and partially based on the cycles of their lives. Ask any successful restaurateur about customer cycles. They’ll tell you that a particular loyal couple may come in 5 weeks in a row, then disappear for a month. Where have they gone?  Why did they leave? What would bring them back sooner? What cycles in their lives have driven this behavior? Which aspects of these cycles can we, as marketers, address? Perhaps they went on a family vacation, and this broke their habit of coming in on Friday nights. Perhaps they felt they were in a rut, that they were boring for never trying a different restaurant. Maybe the red snapper wasn’t up to snuff. Or perhaps she lost her job and they had to cut back.  Each of these specific situations calls for a different response, one that can only be formulated if we understand which situation we are dealing with.

Of course, in a restaurant setting we have the opportunity to interact deeply with our loyal customers and find the answers to these questions. In the “real world,” we (and our competition) spend our resources tracking product sales, sales incentives, consumer promotions, and economic downturns.  If we took even 10% of those resources and devoted them to understanding customer cycles, I believe we would identify sustainable opportunities for differentiation.

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