Acquisition-Only Marketing
Funnels rewarded for new logos under-invest in retention and lifetime value.
"The leaky bucket has a CMO and a head count."
What is Acquisition-Only Marketing? Funnels rewarded for new logos under-invest in retention and lifetime value. Vanity-funnel KPIs ignore unit economics.
Companies with 130% churn proudly hiring more SDRs.
Vanity-funnel KPIs ignore unit economics.
Net-revenue retention as primary growth KPI.
Flip the incentive. Watch the side-effect move.
Funnels rewarded for new logos under-invest in retention and lifetime value. Caught in the wild: Companies with 130% churn proudly hiring more SDRs.
In the room: Vanity-funnel KPIs ignore unit economics.
Counter-move from the Atlas: Net-revenue retention as primary growth KPI.
Pick a reaction to Acquisition-Only Marketing
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The full taxonomy entry
Every concept in the Atlas uses the same structure — so Acquisition-Only Marketing can be compared, recombined, and cited like an element on a periodic table.
- Business
- Leadership
- Government
- Healthcare
- Education
- Sales
- Marketing
- AI
- Negotiation
- Media
- Public Policy
- Relationships
- Where in our org would Acquisition-Only Marketing most often show up unnoticed?
- Which metric, ritual, or contract clause quietly rewards Acquisition-Only Marketing?
- If we removed every payoff for Acquisition-Only Marketing, what behavior would replace it?
- Who benefits when Acquisition-Only Marketing persists — and who pays the cost?
- People defend the status quo using the language of acquisition-only marketing.
- Decisions cluster around the easiest narrative rather than the strongest evidence.
- New data changes the slide deck but not the decision.
- Anyone naming the pattern is treated as the problem.
Every Atlas entry is a node in a knowledge graph. See the related rail below to follow the connections.
See Acquisition-Only Marketing through 2 lenses
Each layer of the Incentives OS reframes this concept with its own thinkers, vocabulary, and diagnostic question.
Do you actually know Acquisition-Only Marketing?
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Which best describes Acquisition-Only Marketing?
Worked example, counter-example & concept map
On-demand AI analysis grounded in the Lab's research. Cached on your device after first run.
Your nervous system has a region for this.
When you encounter Acquisition-Only Marketing, your striatum has built a reward association — and the next time the cue appears, it will push you toward the behavior whether you decide to or not.
Reward learning, habit formation, anticipation, craving, action selection. Habits live here. So do addictions. Variable rewards train this circuit faster than fixed ones.
See Striatum in the Brain Atlas →Picked for you, from the Atlas
Ranked by shared learning paths, overlapping chips, and what you've saved.
Earn-outs designed to retain founders often demotivate the team they bought.
Cuts that lift margin this quarter erode product quality and brand equity over years.
Narrowly tied bonuses get gamed; people optimize the metric, not the underlying goal.
Re-hires often get raises larger than internal promotions.
Pay tied to stock price encourages short-term price management.
CEO pay tied to size rewards deal-making even when acquisitions destroy value.
Send the card, not just the link
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More definitions to follow
Every term in the Atlas connects to a dozen others. Pick any of these and see where it takes you.
Organize around outcomes and projects rather than fixed org-chart roles.
Channeling disruptive emotions and impulses into productive action.
Preparing to teach a concept forces deeper encoding than passively studying it.
Written rules about how AI may be used internally.
Attention is the most contested resource in modern work.
Deliberate, sustained effort to damage someone's reputation.
Convex payoffs gain more than they lose; concave do the opposite.
System 1 is fast, automatic, intuitive; System 2 is slow, effortful, deliberate.
Decoupling production risk from financial loss rewards conversion of fragile landscapes.
Believing past events were obviously predictable once we know how they ended.
We expect small samples to reflect population properties.
Audience attention rewards alarming framings, distorting perception of risk.