Cultivate and Harvest: Why Growth Starts Before the Customer Is Ready to Buy

I’m a huge cycling fan. I subscribe to Peacock for the Tour de France and the Vuelta, and I’ll watch the one-day classics wherever they stream. I’ve ridden for years, less now than I used to, and I’m shopping for a new road bike. I am not a casual shopper. I ride a full-carbon Orbea with Campagnolo Super Record that weighs 15 pounds, the model raced in the Tour de France. I have strong opinions.

So my shortlist was easy. I’d flirted with gravel bikes and ruled them out. Carbon fiber: stiff, responsive, quick and nimble, with race geometry, from a few brands any cycling fan could name. I was down to comparing groupsets and wheel weights, ready to pull the trigger.

Titanium wasn’t on the list. Titanium is for people who own a bike for every season and say things like “ride feel” on group rides.

Then Litespeed came to mind. In the late ’90s, a Litespeed titanium mountain bike was my dream bike. If I’d had the money, I would have bought one. I hadn’t thought about the brand in twenty years, and the moment I started shopping, there it was. Then Moots turned up in my research. A builder’s story here, a long ride review there. Gorgeous bikes. Now I’m the one reading about "ride feel". I’m not proud of it.

Then I found Bastion Cycles out of Australia. They join carbon tubes with 3D-printed titanium: the best of both worlds. And they got me with an emotional hook: “Cycling is more than physical; it’s a journey of the spirit, an exploration of the impossible. A quest to go further, to climb higher.” I want to go further! I want to climb higher!

Will I buy one? A month ago, not a chance. Today, closer to one in five. Nobody offered me a discount. Nobody chased me around the internet with a retargeting ad. They got onto my list while I was still deciding what the list was. Litespeed earned its spot twenty years ago.

I’m not an easy sell, but I appreciate solid marketing. I’ve spent years riding a bike I love, and I have strong opinions about the sport, the bikes and the brands that dominate the European pro peloton. If my list can be reopened, so can your customers’. That matters to anyone with a growth target.

Two decisions, not one

Every marketing deck has the funnel: attention, interest, desire, action. I was well into desire. Then titanium sent me straight back up to interest. I didn’t lose interest in buying a bike. I reopened the list. Google’s research (2020) calls this the messy middle: buyers loop between exploring and evaluating until the day they buy.

And look at what got reopened. Litespeed, Moots and Bastion didn’t beat another carbon brand. They got a whole category back on the table.

That’s the part most growth plans miss. A considered purchase is two decisions. First, which kind of thing: carbon or titanium, surgery or medication, Medicare Advantage or Medigap. Then, which brand of that thing.

Harvesting can only compete in the second decision. Cultivating shapes both.

Toothpaste is decided at the shelf

Not everything is bought this way. For example, toothpaste is decided in the aisle. Brand advertising puts a few names in memory, then the package, the end cap, the shelf position, and the coupon fight it out. Every brand there is still in play, so a late offer can take the sale.

Considered purchases work differently: elective medical procedures, a medical device, a health plan, or a bike that costs more than your first car. The research runs for weeks or months. A wrong choice is expensive. The shortlist forms long before the purchase. It can reopen, as mine did, but only for someone who shows up while the buyer is still looking. A coupon at checkout reopens nothing.

Medicare’s Open Enrollment runs from October 15 to December 7. The plans that make the shortlist start earning their placelong before the window opens.

Three questions tell you which kind of business you’re running:

1. How long do your customers research before they buy?

2. What does a wrong choice cost them?

3. When does the shortlist close: at the shelf, or weeks earlier?

The meeting everyone has had

You know this one. Search is maxed. Cost per click keeps climbing. You’re bidding against the same four competitors for the same people, and every quarter it costs more to buy the same customers. Someone suggests brand. The CFO asks the fair question, "What did the last brand dollar do?" Nobody in the room can answer it in a way that survives the spreadsheet.

So the brand line gets cut again, because nobody can prove it sold anything today. You keep reaching the same responsive people through the same media. Each year a little less of the market knows your name, and the people who do have stopped hearing you. You got good at collecting the easy sales and stopped building trust with everyone else.

Nobody in that room is wrong. Harvesting is the base of the business. It’s measurable, and it pays this quarter. Tools that find people in the market right now are worth every dollar they earn. But there are only so many buyers in the market at once, every competitor is bidding on them, and the relationship is often only as deep as the last offer. The customer who chose you for a coupon will leave you for one. They’re loyal to the deal, not the brand, and that’s a big difference.

Everyone loves low-hanging fruit. So does every competitor, and the crowd at the bottom of the tree is growing. In Gartner’s 2025 CMO Spend Survey, two and a half times as many CMOs planned to prioritize performance marketing over brand. I’ve watched the same thing in elective medical and senior markets: brand is the first line cut, or it’s the direct-response TV budget with a new label. Growth is higher up, where fewer hands reach. Set the ladder higher, and the harvest will be plentiful in due season.

The real problem is the evidence. Performance marketing’s greatest strength is that it shows, almost in real time, the last thing a customer touched before they bought. Mismanaged, that strength becomes its greatest weakness: it sees the last touch and calls it the cause. Search collects demand that something else created, and the report gives search the credit.

The research on the long game is solid. Les Binet and Peter Field studied 996 campaigns in the IPA’s effectiveness databank, spanning 1980 to 2010. Activation lifted sales quickly and faded. Brand building paid off over years and made customers less price-sensitive. In Litespeed's case, it paid off twenty years later. They found the best balance was roughly 60% brand, 40% activation. That’s an average across hundreds of brands. Your number depends on your buying cycle and economics, and finding it is the work. A seven-day attribution window sees none of that. So the money that brings in next year’s buyers looks worthless on this quarter’s dashboard, and it’s the first thing cut.

Cultivating costs money today, and not everyone you reach this month will buy this month. But look at where the premium comes from. Binet told Marketing Week in 2023 that across more than 2,000 case studies, he’d found no example of a company strengthening its pricing power by targeting existing customers. The premium comes from the people who aren’t buying from you yet. They arrive already trusting you, willing to pay more at least once to try you. And I’ve watched the next part for twenty years: when the experience holds from the first ad to the final invoice, they come back and bring people with them. Every interaction leaves an emotional aftertaste. Your brand is the sum of them.

Give the CFO an answer

I built Elevate Signal because I kept sitting in that meeting. Attribution answers one question: where did the last sale come from? That’s a rear-view mirror. The growth question looks forward, and no single report can answer it. So Signal starts with the questions this article raises.

Are you on the shortlist? Brand preference research shows where you stand against competitors, what drives choice, and what each market segment wants, including people who haven’t bought from you yet.

Is the brand money working? Signal tracks awareness against brand spend month by month and assigns a cost and value to each point of awareness. It reads your share of search against named rivals, the measure Les Binet presented to the IPA in 2020 as an early predictor of market share.

Who is worth cultivating? Customer segments, retention, and lifetime value show which customers matter most, and what you can afford to pay to win more like them.

Where should the money go? The marketing model reads every channel, including the slow ones, and shows where its read disagrees with your other evidence. Those disagreements become tests, and every test result sharpens the next read.

Then I do the part software can’t. I turn that evidence into a recommendation: what audience to prioritize, what position to strengthen, what to fund, what to cut, and what to test first. Brand moves come out as options worth testing, with the criteria to judge them. That’s a conversation a CFO can have.

Harvesting pays this quarter. Cultivating decides who you get to harvest next year.

Which future customers are missing from your plan today?

If you can’t answer that yet, a Diagnostic is where we’d start.

Erin Barr is the founder of Elevate Marketing and the builder of Elevate Signal. He helps consumer brands turn marketing investment into profitable growth, whether customers buy online, over the phone, or through an appointment. His experience spans healthcare, elective medical, insurance, senior markets, ecommerce, and consumer goods.