An early test of Social Value took place in Boston, and was done in cooperation with the fashion brand Lily Pulitzer. Their flagship stores stocked a variety of bright pinks, oranges, and reds, all appealing to an aspirational, upper-class lifestyle image. Like any business, they wanted to increase sales, and they wondered whether some of their best customers were impacting others. So the question was “Who are the most coolest girls in Boston?” Or at least, who are the most influential and impactful young ladies already in our dataset?
Social Value found the answers, generating a set of IDs that had provably shown to impact others. When these young ladies bought, their friends bought. This was the first evidence of a true ripple effect in retail.
The discovery at the time was that these customers were part of a “power law,” or the idea that the most of something comes from a small portion of people. It’s sometimes called the “80/20 rule,” and in this case it meant that 80% of the influence could be traced back to a super-valuable 20% of the shoppers.
If you think about it, you’ll realize that this moment is essentially the end of regular LTV thinking. Once you know that a person’s actual revenue impact goes beyond just their spending, you can never think about standard LTV again.
Now the question is “How do we use this information to drive sales?”
