We went looking for evidence that people who show up buy more. Here is what we found, including the parts that do not help us.
Every item below was read at abstract or snippet level. Where we could not see a number, we say so rather than rounding one up.
Where the evidence is good
Online communities with transaction data attached are the strongest case.
Manchanda, Packard and Pattabhiramaiah (Marketing Science, 2015) attribute about 19% of post-launch revenue from community customers to the act of joining, comparing joiners against non-joiners at a multichannel retailer. Rishika and colleagues (Information Systems Research, 2013) find roughly 5.6% more revenue and about 5% more visits, using propensity-matched transaction data.
Two studies, two designs, an order of magnitude between them. That spread is the honest headline.
Where it gets thinner
The research on offline brand communities — car clubs, Camp Jeep, Harley owners — is survey and ethnography. Algesheimer, Dholakia and Herrmann (2005) is the best known of them, and it measures intentions and attitudes. No transaction outcome.
Event marketing is the same shape. Zarantonello and Schmitt (2013) find that attending raises brand equity on a survey. No purchase data, and no non-attendee control group visible.
So: for in-person attendance leading to repeat purchase, we could not find a credible independent number at all. The figures that circulate come from vendor self-report or case studies with undisclosed methods.
The correction that should worry everyone
Loyalty-programme research is the nearest thing to an offline analogue with real data, and it carries the most useful warning.
Leenheer and colleagues (International Journal of Research in Marketing, 2007) modelled seven Dutch loyalty programmes and found the effect roughly seven times smaller once self-selection is corrected for. About 86% of the raw share-of-wallet effect disappears.
The people who join the programme were already your best customers. The programme gets credit for what they were going to do anyway. Any measurement of a room full of regulars has exactly the same problem, ours included.
And at your scale
Every transaction-linked study above concerns a large firm. We found nothing with a control group at studio, café or shop scale.
The nearest useful thing for a studio is not a revenue number but an attrition one: Sperandei and colleagues (2016), on a 5,240-member fitness-centre panel, found 63% of new members quit before month three and under 4% were still going continuously past twelve months.
That is the shape of the problem you are actually working against.
What we take from it
Mechanism evidence is decent. Causal evidence at your scale does not exist. So we will not tell you that attendance raises purchases, and we will not build a number that pretends to know.
What we will do is measure the thing we can see honestly — who comes back, and how often — and be explicit that it is a leading indicator rather than the outcome.
conpeo
- Manchanda, P., Packard, G. & Pattabhiramaiah, A. (2015): Social Dollars. Marketing Science 34(3).
- Rishika, R., Kumar, A., Janakiraman, R. & Bezawada, R. (2013): The Effect of Customers' Social Media Participation on Customer Visit Frequency and Profitability. Information Systems Research 24(1).
- Leenheer, J., van Heerde, H. J., Bijmolt, T. H. A. & Smidts, A. (2007): Do loyalty programs really enhance behavioral loyalty? International Journal of Research in Marketing 24(1).
- Algesheimer, R., Dholakia, U. M. & Herrmann, A. (2005): The Social Influence of Brand Community. Journal of Marketing 69(3), 19–34.
- Zarantonello, L. & Schmitt, B. H. (2013): The impact of event marketing on brand equity. International Journal of Advertising 32(2).
- Sperandei, S., Vieira, M. C. & Reis, A. C. (2016): Adherence to physical activity in an unsupervised setting. Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport 19(11).