how important it is to track every piece of marketing you do, I said. Once we started testing and measuring, Barry's approach to marketing changed forever. He started to focus on results-driven campaigns with a low acquisition cost. There would be no more blind forays with money thrown about in the hope some of it would work. Instead of the usual Call in to Barry's Bakery for a great choice of the freshest breads type of ad that you see everywhere, we decided to try something a little different. I asked Barry, How much do your chocolate eclairs sell for? $2.50, he replied. OK, how much do they cost you to make? With a tinge of embarrassment he replied, 30 cents. Great. That means we have a product offering great perceived value that really costs you very little. Let's start giving them away. After a little convincing we spent the same $300 in the local paper, but this time the headline simply read, Free Chocolate Eclair. The response was enormous, and it was a cinch to test and measure. At the end of the week we counted 229 coupons. All up the campaign had cost Barry $68.70 in eclairs and $300 for the ad- $368.70 in total. Now do you think all those 229 people simply came into the bakery to collect their eclairs? Of course not. Sure some did, but by Barry's calculations the average spent from the coupon crowd was $6.50-you try going into a bakery shop and stopping with one eclair. Let's look at the new acquisition cost. It was now costing Barry only $1.61 per new customer (this includes the cost of the eclairs). That means these new customers, on average, were outspending their acquisition cost by $4.89. This basic little change, which started with testing and measuring, focusing on the customer's acquisition cost as well as getting a little creative, completely changed the marketing strategies of Barry's Bakery. 39