Almost every business builds its plans around the average customer. Average spend, average frequency, average lifetime value. Marketing budgets, team sizes, annual targets. All built around this one person.
There's just one problem. That person barely exists.
I recently looked at fresh data from two online casinos. Every single visit was tracked, so there was no guesswork involved.
According to the reports, the average customer visits 4–5 times a month. So I went looking for these people. I found about one in fourteen.
How does that happen? A handful of customers were pulling the average way up. One person visited 174 times in a single month. Meanwhile, more than half showed up once and never came back.
In fact, just 10% of customers accounted for more than half of all visits.
The average had mashed two completely different crowds into one: people who dropped by once and people who practically lived there.
It's like the average temperature in a hospital. It looks perfectly normal on paper, except half the patients have a fever and the other half are already cold.
You'll find the same thing almost everywhere. Every gym has people who pay for a membership and never show up, alongside a small group who practically live there. Every coffee shop has random passers-by and regulars whose orders the barista knows by heart.
So maybe the better question isn't "What does my average customer want?" It's "Who are the different groups of people using my business, and what does each of them actually need?"
Some need a reason to come back a second time. Others just need you to notice them before they stop coming back at all.