CAC Pack

What is the most clever customer acquisition strategy you’ve ever seen?

— Patrick OShaughnessy (@patrick_oshag) April 21, 2021

Patrick O’Shaughnessy asked about clever customer acquisitions. The replies are pretty good.

In college, I played ultimate frisbee. Recruiting was kind of difficult. The traditional method was to buy card stock table tents and litter the dorm eateries. That seemed cluttered to me. I took our marketing money and subsidized t-shirts to $5 each. One guy on the team bought four. Did they work? Who knows. Was it better than table tents? For sure.

Customer Acquisition (Costs) strategies are not so easy to organize. Marketing? Samples? Scrolling through replies I settled on five. The whole stories are in podcast form: Overcast, iTunes.

The highlights:

1. McDonald’s Kid Meals were created in Guatemala by a struggling franchise. The thinking was: kids eat less and different food. The Happy Meal was created in Chicago when an advertiser Bob Bernstein watched his son eat cereal for breakfast and read the box.
2. AOL discs were everywhere because AOL had previously sent boxes to homes and saw a staggering conversion. At the time people had computers, but not software the getting people to try AOL was like a lot of other consumer products. Steve Case had worked at P&G and gotten shampoo distributed the same ways. (At one point AOL was half of worldwide CD manufacturing).
3. “PS I love you, get your free e-mail at Hotmail.” was the original email signature. VC Tim Draper was an ’84 Harvard MBA and studied Tupperware. The I love you was dropped and the line worked.
4. Netflix used coupons in DVD players in 2000-2002, a lollapalooza of technology, selection, and customer demand.
5. When Rich Barton launched Expedia he asked Bill Gates for millions to buy TV ads and Gates said ‘Yes’. When Barton launched Zillow he asked Bill Gurley for millions to buy TV ads and Gurley said ‘No’. The difference was the business model. What might work instead? The Zestimate.

The theme across these is that a business disrupted an incumbent (or itself) by taking something that worked in one area and applied it to another. The cleverer the angle, the less the financial cost.