It’s an apt metaphor for businesses.
We fool ourselves thinking that we bring customers in, and that they stay with us for ever and as they stay with us we can sell them more and grow.
It’s a nice picture… but completely wrong. Your business is a bucket. You attract new customers they fall into your bucket. You switch your competitor customers and they fall into your bucket… but Customers also leave.
Your customers will defect to your competition. They will stop buying or buy less. They will go out of business. Inside your customers your key contact retires, or resigns, or is promoted and the new contact prefers their old supplier or wants to make a mark and so chooses a new supplier.
Your business is a leaky bucket.
The only way to keep a leaky bucket FULL is the keep pouring new customers in the top. You can try to patch the holes but inevitably customers leak. And they way to bring in new buyers is to advertise as shown by the often ignored research of the Ehrenberg-Bass institute
How we can best do that… next week