Customer Acquisition Consulting

Customer acquisition consulting is the work of deciding which customers are worth acquiring, what those customers are actually choosing between, and whether the economics of winning them hold. Vivaldi is a strategy firm. We do not buy media, run bidding or operate growth teams, and the questions we answer sit upstream of all three: who you should be trying to acquire, what it would take to change their mind, and what that customer is worth once you have them.

• Since 1999strategy work on brand, demand and growth
• 200+published case studies
• 10 officeson four continents
• 5xWirtschaftsWoche Best of Consulting, Strategy and Innovation

When companies bring us in

Customer acquisition consulting is usually bought by a CMO, a CRO or a chief growth officer, and the trigger is rarely a channel that has stopped working. It is a disagreement about who the company should be chasing.

• Growth targets now require customers nobody has decided are worth having. The plan assumes a larger addressable base without anyone having argued why those people would switch.
• Acquisition cost is reported by channel and nobody can state it by customer type. The expensive customers and the cheap ones are averaged into a single number that hides both.
• The customers being won are not the ones the business wanted. Volume arrives, margin does not, and retention is worse in the new cohorts than in the old ones.
• A new segment is being entered on the assumption it works like the existing one. Same proposition, same proof, a buyer with a different alternative.
• Finance has started asking what a customer is worth and marketing cannot answer it in a form the CFO will accept.

Why cutting acquisition cost is the wrong first question

The standard response to an acquisition problem is to make acquisition cheaper. Tighten targeting, improve conversion, rebalance the channel mix, renegotiate the rates. All of it is legitimate work and all of it treats the set of customers you are trying to acquire as a given.

It almost never is. Cost per acquired customer is not a property of your marketing. It is a property of the customer: what they currently use, how satisfied they are with it, how much switching costs them, and how much they are worth to you afterwards. Two companies running identical campaigns against different customers will report wildly different economics, and neither number says anything about how well the campaigns were run.

This matters because the lever most companies reach for is the weakest one available. Efficiency work operates on a bounded range. Choosing a different customer, or changing what a customer believes before you ever bid for them, operates on a much wider one. A business can halve its blended acquisition cost by acquiring a different mix of people, and spend three years failing to do the same thing through optimization.

So the first question is not what acquisition costs. It is which acquisitions are worth making, and that is a judgment about demand and preference rather than about media.

What our customer acquisition consulting services include

Five bodies of work. Most engagements use three of them.

1. Acquisition economics by customer, not by channel

Before anything is decided, the numbers have to be cut the way the decision will be made.

• Cost to acquire, broken out by customer type and demand occasion rather than only by the channel that happened to deliver them
• What each type is worth over a horizon long enough to be honest, including the ones that look cheap to acquire and never repeat
• The share of spend converting demand somebody else created, separated from the share creating demand of your own
• Payback by cohort, so the argument survives contact with finance

2. Deciding which customers are worth acquiring

The output of this work is a list of customers you have decided to pursue and, as importantly, a list you have decided to decline in writing.

• Demand spaces defined by what customers are trying to get done, not by demographics that merely correlate
• An explicit judgment about where you have a right to win against the alternative that customer already has
• The segments where acquisition is possible but the economics will never clear, named rather than quietly attempted

3. The choice your buyer is actually making

Acquisition assumes a switch, and a switch assumes something being switched away from. Most acquisition plans never write down what that is.

• The real alternative set, which frequently includes doing nothing and is frequently not the competitor set in the deck
• What the customer is trading off at the point of choice, and where that choice is made
• The specific belief that has to change for them to choose you without being paid to

4. The preference argument that lowers the price of acquisition

Preference is a discount applied to every subsequent acquisition, and it does not appear in any channel report.

• The proposition and the proof that make the choice obvious, expressed consistently wherever it is actually made
• A deliberate split between building preference and converting it, held separately in the plan so each can be judged on what it returns
• What to stop saying, which is usually the harder half

5. A measurement model your CFO will accept

Acquisition arguments lose budget in planning rounds because they are made in marketing metrics to an audience that does not use them.

• Cost and value per acquired customer by segment, tracked together rather than separately
• A written link between what the brand is doing and what acquisition costs, which most marketing functions have never assembled
• Leading indicators that move before the blended number does, so a two-quarter change is not abandoned in month four

How a customer acquisition engagement works

1. Diagnose. Customer and non-customer research, a cut of acquisition cost and customer value by segment rather than by channel, and interviews with the people who own the number. The output is a clear view of who you are actually acquiring and what they are worth.
2. Decide. Demand spaces sized and ranked, the right to win assessed against the alternative each customer already has, and the segments to decline written down. The output is a decision with exclusions, not a menu.
3. Build. The proposition and proof for each chosen demand space, the split between building preference and converting it, and the business case that ties the two to customer value.
4. Embed. A measurement model, a planning cadence and the briefing material your agencies and growth teams need, so the choice holds after we leave.

Why companies choose Vivaldi for customer acquisition

Three reasons, and they are the same three reasons we are the wrong firm for some briefs.

• We work on the choice, not the channel. We are not paid to place spend, so we have no interest in the answer being more of it. If the constraint is execution rather than selection, we will say so and you should hire differently.
• We bring demand spaces rather than demographics. Our segmentation work starts from what customers are trying to get done, which is the only cut of the market that predicts what they will pay and what will make them switch.
• We make the argument in the CFO's language. Customer value, payback and the link between brand investment and acquisition cost, assembled so it survives a planning round rather than a marketing meeting.

How to evaluate a customer acquisition consultant

Worth asking of any firm on your shortlist, including us.

• Ask whether they will change who you target, or only how you reach them. Both are real work. Only one of them changes the economics, and most firms are set up to sell the other.
• Ask how they explain rising acquisition costs. A firm that attributes all of it to auction dynamics and privacy changes has excused the part of the problem you can influence.
• Ask what a customer is worth in their model. If cost per acquisition appears without the value side next to it, you are buying volume management rather than acquisition strategy.
• Ask what they will tell you to stop acquiring. An acquisition plan with no exclusions in it has not made a decision.
• Ask who signs off their work. If the answer never includes finance, the budget stays vulnerable at the next planning round regardless of the results.

Strategy firm, performance agency or in-house growth team?

Related work

Acquisition questions arrive bundled. These are the ones most often mistaken for this page, and where each belongs.

• Performance marketing if the question is paid efficiency, bidding or the mechanics of cost per acquisition.
• Segmentation and targeting if the question is who to target and how the market should be cut.
• Go-to-market strategy if the question is how a new offer reaches its first buyers.
• Demand landscape mapping if the question is where demand exists at all, and how large each space is.
• Marketing strategy if the question is the overall plan rather than the acquisition part of it.
• Sales enablement if the acquisition happens through a B2B selling motion rather than a buying one.

Customer acquisition is part of our brand acceleration work at Vivaldi, the strategy firm behind the Demand Landscape and the Interaction Field.

Customer acquisition consulting in the US and worldwide

We run acquisition work from ten offices on four continents, most often out of New York for US clients and out of our European and Asian offices for the rest. The work is usually done with a client team rather than delivered to one, because the decisions involved outlive the engagement.

The pattern changes by market. In the US the constraint is typically a crowded category where every competitor is bidding for the same intent and the alternative a customer already has is strong. In less saturated markets the constraint is more often that the demand space has never been defined, so nobody can say which customers are worth acquiring in the first place. The method is the same in both: establish what a customer is worth, establish what they are choosing between, and only then decide what you are willing to pay.