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Why the world’s most valuable customer
doesn’t care about your brand
You can put a bigger logo on it. You can write a catchier jingle or hire a bigger star to promote your brand. It won’t work. You can drop your price, you can stack on features, but if you don’t understand this kind of customer, it could be that your business, your brand, and your career are on their way to the bone yard.
A misconception lies at the core of any examination of the world’s most valuable consumer. It isn’t about money or status – far from it. It isn’t even about demographics.
Yet this is the consumer who drives the success of almost every thriving business that exists today. This is the confident, individualistic spender whose purchasing power drove trend-busting growth for a select group of businesses right through the worst recession in seventy years. This is the consumer who saved Apple, built Subaru, walked away from Starbucks, and skipped the drive-thru at McDonald’s. This is the Finder.
Finders are the world’s best shoppers. There are 120 million of them living in North America today.
They have the income to back their energetic spending habits but live by values that aren’t really about money and they never have been.
In 2002, Australian social scientist Ross Honeywill began a landmark study that tracked 100,000 adults living in North America, Europe and Australia. Using 84 attitudinal factors and 100 behavioral markers, he examined consumer habits, lifestyle choices, career preferences, information use, and a wide range of related factors that included a sense of self-determination and personal values.
The research revealed an extraordinary customer group, one made up of highly individualistic consumers who spend readily but don’t make purchase decisions based on price, features, status or brand. Honeywill called this group the New Economic Order, or NEO for short. In the process, he also revealed a subset of this group that is generally younger and correspondingly, holds a lower level of disposable income. He called these Evolvers. Or, as you might know them, "millennials."" In both cases, Honeywill had found the Finders.
Honeywill’s research also identified another group of consumers who occupy the opposite end of the attitudinal spectrum. This is a more traditional customer, one who will only buy when put into a state of high stimulation by low prices, a bang-for-the-buck list of features, status and the reassurance of a popular brand. These are the “Keepers.” Keepers represent a little over 50% of the American population but are low-value consumers who account for less than a quarter of discretionary spending. This in spite of the fact that they are treated as the target group for the vast majority of all mass marketing and advertising campaigns.
In 2008, British expat Christopher Norton joined forces with Honeywill to bring the NEO study to America. By 2012, the two had gathered a total of one million respondents over what was now a 10-year period. The updated study was then evaluated by KPMG who compared it to standard research models like Yankelovich and declared it one of the most robust and usable research models in existence.
Demographics do little to describe Finders and Millennial or Evolving Finders. Try this instead.
1. Finders make purchases based on high levels of discretion instead of basic needs fulfillment. Finders will consider a set of drivers that includes the realness of the product and the particular pleasure that would come of owning or using it.
2. Finders are far more likely to spend. But not for the sake of spending! They experience a level of pleasure in the act of discovering.
3. Finders earn more. Finders are five times more likely to earn over $100,000 per year.
4. Brands do not work the same way with Finders. To many, a brand can symbolize the status, values, and character of both the product and the buyer. Not to Finders.
There’s much more, for example here’s number 11: want the rest? BUY THE BOOK!
11. Product and experience come before price. Finders don’t buy on price when the product matters to them. A low price only matters when a Finder doesn’t really care about the product.. Anything that doesn’t strike a desire in the Finder will be treated the same way as any other commodity and only then will price become the foremost consideration. A gallon of gas is a gallon of gas.
When the last recession ended the world had changed and new brands would grow out of it as others faded. For example, branded big beer sales have been dropping by as much as 15% every year since 2014 while craft-brewery sales continue to grow. On the losing side of any change in the consumer landscape, you will always find a price-conscious, discount-seeking Keeper customer. On the profitable and growing side, you will always meet the Finder. With very few exceptions, the business to be in is the one chosen by the Finder.
But today, as we face a decade-defining pandemic, the world is even more upside-down. Yet when it rights itself, the dominant consumer driver of growth and recovery will once again be the Finder.
The gulf between two kinds of customer, the Finder and the Keeper, grows wider every day. And the companies who do business with Finders continue to do what they have been doing for the past decade - grow in spite of economic boom or bust. Meanwhile, a bleak future awaits those who continue to court the spending - shy Keeper through ever gaudier price cuts and ever higher stacks of features. These are the companies that will succumb to commoditization and join the ranks of their deceased spiritual brethren at nearly forgotten failures like Circuit City, Linens N Things and The Bombay Company.
There is no way to turn what has become a commodity into anything but just that, and no matter what you sell that flat screen TV for, someone else will sell it for less. A Finder company must be in the business of creating the definitive product in its category. A Finder company just can’t be right company for everyone. Instead it must make the right product for that right person, the individual who will willingly, even happily, pay whatever the price is to use it, to own it, to eat it, to stay at it, or to travel to it. It must be a product or even a brand that shares his or her passion for real authenticity, exploration, integrity and self-determination. Study the success stories of every company that grew through the last recession, and you will find those values and those qualities.
Millennials are merely the tip of the world’s biggest consumer iceberg – they are a more visible subset of a hyperactive spender known as the Finder. Yet too many businesses overlook the opportunities that the Finder consumer has to offer, instead choosing to court the wrong kind of customer and default to a lower price, a bigger brand and more features to boost sales. This has resulted in a downward competitive cycle where price-for-a-set-of-features becomes the only thing that matters. This negative cycle drives the commoditization of everything from cheeseburgers to SUVs. The cycle is broken only by a focus on a customer type that exists outside of outmoded definitions.
When you discover the Finders, you will learn how the companies that do business with them are recession-proof, fast-growing, and incredibly profitable. To learn the lessons of Finders & Keepers is to bring transformative change and unprecedented success to almost any organization.
Why do some businesses fail while others seem to thrive no matter what? This fast-moving, real-world analysis of the 10 year, one million respondent NEO study reveals the secrets of the Finder and the hazards of the Keeper. Finders & Keepers will show how failing to identify which customer you are in business with is perilous, while trying to appeal to both at once is deadly.
Finders & Keepers is a revelation for anyone who is committed to success in business today and a must-read for every CMO and CEO whose fate begins and ends with the customer.
Now available on Amazon, in the Kindle Store, in the Apple Store, and at better bookstores.
