First Question Any Marketer Should Ask Themselves: "Does This Action Help Drive An Emotional Purchase?"

"Does this increase the probability of driving an emotional purchase?"

This was the most productive decision making filter we applied to our business.

For the longest time at Chubbies, this wasn't even in the consideration set.

My filter was simply "Does this increase the probability of driving a purchase?"

Leaving out the word "emotional", while seemingly insignificant, had far-reaching impacts on how we architected everything we did.

Because most of the data we gathered pertained to driving short-term purchases, that's where we focused all our efforts.

What we learned is that the channels, tactics, and creative that best drove purchases in the short term appealed to the logical, to the rational.

This doesn't only apply to advertising.

When I say "channels, tactics, and creative", I'm referring to everything we were doing as an organization.

The channels, tactics, and creative that drive an emotional purchase are different.

We make rational purchase decisions with a skeptical, critical-thinking approach. We consciously weigh the costs and the benefits - the pros and the cons. We look at product features, discounts, and other promotional components and we compare across other similar alternatives.

With emotional purchase decisions, the process is the opposite.

The decision is lazy. It's simple.

"I need shorts. I buy Chubbies."


The key here is that we don't do only one or the other.

Over time, we assigned equal priority to both filters.

We heavily invested time, focus, people, and dollars into strengthening our audience's emotional connection with Chubbies.

Then, two things happened:

1) An ever-increasing number of people purchased from us without even needing to be prompted with any kind of conversion focused tactics at all

2) And, for the people who did see our activation (or conversion) efforts, it was more efficient and effective.

None of this happened right away, even though we wanted it to.

Early on, we didn't commit.

I mean, why in the world would we knowingly reduce our ROAS? It made no sense at the time.

However, we learned other metrics mattered just as much - or more - as decreasing CAC or increasing ROAS calculated on a short term, last-click basis:

1. ⬆️ contribution profit dollars while holding steady, or increasing, contribution margin.
2. ⬆️ the percentage share of unpaid branded searches in our categories.
3. ⬆️ the dollar amount, and the percentage share of new customer acquisition revenue coming through owned and organic (unpaid) traffic sources.

We realized that when we looked at the 3 metrics above, they were not trending in the right direction, even though, at times, CAC and ROAS were looking good.

More importantly, if continued for much longer, a singular focus on CAC and ROAS would have put us out of business.

This made it obvious across the whole company that a balanced approach was not only ideal, but required, and that our investments needed to reflect that.