Part 4. Customer Analytics

A customer receiving a shopping bag at a store counter

Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash

Part 4 zooms out. Part 3 asked which customers should receive a specific campaign. Now the question is broader: how should the business treat the customer base as a whole?

For decades, advertisers bought media using broad demographic buckets like “Women 25–54.” P&G later described this as “wasteful mass marketing” and shifted toward hundreds of behavior-based smart audiences (Vizard 2019). In practice, a segment only matters if it changes your actions.

Part 4 is built around two questions:

  1. Who are our customers, and how should we treat different groups differently?
  2. What is each customer worth over time, and how much can we afford to spend to acquire and retain them?

Segmentation answers the first. CLV modeling answers the second. Together, they form a customer decision system: who gets attention, and how much you spend on each group.