Tracking more than 1 million consumers, our ensemble has been successful at identifying severe slowdowns in demand for key goods and services.
(12) Our current list contains outliers that have shown dramatic deceleration in demand online.
Tracking more than 1 million consumers, our ensemble has been successful at identifying severe slowdowns in demand for key goods and services.
(12) Our current list contains outliers that have shown dramatic deceleration in demand online.
> Email Intelligence successfully detected the collapse of one of the biggest FOMO driven manias in US history: “crypto trading”.
> Random Walk ensemble alerted investor partners to sharp deceleration in orders, new account “welcome” confirmations, as well as a higher deletion rate for new product offerings.
> Wall Street bankers and analysts, motivated to sell the management “narrative”, extrapolate unsustainable growth rates into the future, but RW data can help uncover inflections
In 2020 and into 2021 our data indicated strong, but likely transient growth in new “Welcome to Coinbase” email confirmations. This unsustainable growth was driven by a ‘Black Swan’ mosaic of factors: bored locked down Americans, unprecedented Uncle Sam stimulus checks, and social media FOMO pictures of teens in pajamas getting rich trading Crypto Kitties.
After lockdowns and free money ended in late 2021 our ensemble uncovered slowing in new customer confirmation emails, and we added COIN to our slowing list.
‘GENIUS’ SUPER BOWL QR AD GENERATES CLICKS NOT CUSTOMERS
Above: Super Bowl Ad fails to generate customers, but drove worthless clicks due to its nebulous nature
Several additional data driven trends revealed themselves earlier this year. The inability for a $14 million Super Bowl ad to attract new customers was apparent as our data detected no spike in new accounts. While the media focused on worthless “clicks” our data showed a lack of actual new customers. Management hubris led to equivocating marketing a crypto-trading platform with proven consumers products such as alcohol/beer, quick service restaurants, auto, apparel etc.
EMAILS PROMOTING SUBSCRIPTION, NFT PRODUCTS DELETED
In March, our email intelligence indicated very high delete rates for new products marketed with email promotions such as Coinbase One, and Coinbase NFTs. With gas at $6 a gallon and $25 hamburgers and rising rates, consumers had lost interest, as they prioritized getting to work and feeding their families over possessing digital unicorn.
BITCOIN SPIKES, TRADING VOLUMES DON’T
The lack of interest in trading “cryptos” despite a spike in bitcoin after Putin invaded Ukraine showed in our data and confirmed the slowing trend.
AS BROADER EQUITY MARKETS CORRECT, CUSTOMER GROWTH ENDS
Once the high growth equity tech bubble began to collapse and consumers saw their 529 plans, 401ks, and brokerage accounts decline, they quickly shifted their preferences away from crypto trading.
Download the full Coinbase PDF here
Updated weekly, our industry leading email intelligence tracks consumers in near real-time. Identify trends and inflections before earnings, and ahead of the street.
Our email intelligence uncovered a subtle, but critical change in the email sending patterns of EBAY.
During COVID as demand had risen to unprecedented levels, EBAY throttled back the frequency and intensity of their email campaigns and discounting. However, this March our proprietary systems detected a reversal, with EBAY ramping up a specific type of email campaign containing discounting language unseen before. As management began to see COVID demand wane, they began using steeper promotional language in specific product categories. We identified this and warned our clients. In ETSY our tracking of order confirmation volumes showed a significant sequential slowdown in April.
Our ensemble has detected incredible, all-time high demand for car rentals(CAR) this spring as locked up Americans return to travel. This has resulted in less time and interest than a year ago for stocking up the home on small electronics(BBY), home décor (BBBY, ETSY), at home fitness (NLS).
In the COVID era Americans are spending more time indoors hovering over their laptops, ipads, iphones looking for entertainment. With only so much Netflix (NFLX) content available for binging, consumers are ramping their COD, GTA and other gaming activity. The recent Reddit GME casino hysteria perhaps the most intense form of “online gaming” seen in history.
Using our proprietary email intelligence, we investigated whether there was any evidence of actual demand increases for the stale brick and mortars dinosaur GameStop.
Below our promotional ensemble quantifies exactly how desperate GameStop was in attempting to generate sales surrounding the critical holiday period. Compared with a year ago incentive email offers have risen an astounding 1300%. Also alarming, is our classification has tagged substantially more steep discounts than a year ago. Upon closer inspection these are from increasing coupons such as “up to 50% off games”, “$40 off used games”. Increasing discounts for core product offering bode poorly for demand.
Often times with the focus on online, management teams are shifting sales from in-store to online in an effort to show evolution. However, our promotional data reveals much of this increased e-commerce activity is from pushing out steep , never seen before discounts to their existing customer base.