Little
At this point, the story of the limited edition Oreo is well-told: it’s not to green-icing cookies; it’s to sell more of the original.
Oreo, in fact, is pretty open about this.
It’s almost disarming in its simplicity: do this thing and watch this thing happen.
Across large brands, you see this happen.
In the book R.E.D. Marketing, the authors talk about how specific campaigns for Taco Bell and KFC were credited with lifting sales in certain regions. April Dunford, the technology positioning expert, has said that simply changing a sales pitch for a commoditized product improved competitive win rates.
The piece here that stands out to us is the simplicity: a thing changed and it had this global impact.
Why, then, in the world of DTC are we so worked up about the minute impacts of our changes?
Jonah Berger, the Wharton professor who wrote “Contagious,” once wrote:
Why do people obsess over LinkedIn Connections or Twitter followers? SAT scores, golf handicaps, or even gas mileage? Because they are observable metrics that are easy to compare. Someone who has more LinkedIn connections must have more expertise. Someone with more Twitter followers must be more “influential.” So people use these metrics as a yardstick. An easy way to assess whether they are doing well.
But just because a metric is easy to capture doesn’t mean it’s the right metric to use. More followers don’t actually equal more influence. More connections don’t necessarily mean more expertise. They may just mean someone spends a lot of time on the site.
This collection of “little data” observations are interesting to us in light of Sarah’s LinkedIn post this week.
In it, she wrote that an early look for a correlation between email performance metrics and repurchase rates came up empty. In other words, your ESP-reported revenue per recipient in a replenishment flow or winback flow doesn’t appear to actually tell you whether it’s achieving its goal.
To pull from Berger, it may be easy to capture, but it’s not the right metric to use. It tells you little.
Instead, perhaps, maybe a move back to simplifying our approach would be beneficial.