Where Heavy Buyers Actually Come From (It's Not Who You Think)

Most marketers spend their careers chasing the wrong people.

Conventional wisdom says to find more people who look like your best customers. Build a loyalty program. Double down on your most valuable segment. Mine your CRM for your top 20%. The logic feels airtight. In practice, the data keeps disproving it.

Heavy buyers don't come from a hidden loyal core waiting to be unlocked. They come from the broad, accessible population that occasionally buys your category. And the best evidence for this isn't a thought experiment. It's what the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute has been documenting for decades, and what Byron Sharp laid out in How Brands Grow.

Patrick Gilbert covers this in Never Always, Never Never, and the argument is harder to dismiss than most marketers want to admit.

The Pareto Myth Is Costing You Growth

At this point, the 80/20 rule is marketing folklore. Focus on your top 20% of customers. They drive 80% of revenue. Protect them. Reward them. Extract more from them.

Except that's not what the data shows.

Research from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute finds that in most categories, the top 20% of customers account for a meaningful but significantly smaller share of revenue than the 80/20 rule suggests. That still represents a real concentration. But it means a substantial portion of revenue comes from everyone else: the occasional buyers, the low-frequency purchasers, the people who barely register in your CRM.

That other portion isn't a rounding error. It's the growth engine.

One reason marketers miss this is that they look at their customer base as a static hierarchy. Heavy buyers at the top. Light buyers at the bottom. The instinct is to climb the pyramid, convert light buyers into heavy ones, and keep heavy buyers heavy.

But Byron Sharp's Law of Buyer Moderation pushes back on this directly. Heavy buyers regress toward the mean. The customer buying your product six times a year isn't going to buy it twelve times next year because you sent them a birthday discount. And the light buyer who bought once last year? They might buy three times next year because they're hosting a party, changed jobs, or moved somewhere with better access to your category. That fluctuation is mostly outside your control, and mostly outside theirs too.

Growth doesn't come from extracting more from heavy buyers. It comes from winning incremental purchases from the much larger pool of light buyers.

Who the Heavy Buyers Actually Are

Here's where it gets interesting, and where the housing market data offers a useful real-world illustration.

NAR's 2025 generational report found that baby boomers are now the largest share of home buyers at 42%, while millennials fell to 29%. If you were targeting the housing market based on cultural assumptions about who's buying, you'd have gotten this badly wrong. Heavy buyers in housing right now are older, wealthier, and buying with cash. According to NAR, 50% of older boomers and 40% of younger boomers are purchasing homes entirely with cash. That buying power doesn't come from loyalty. It comes from life-stage, equity, and urgency.

NAR's Jessica Lautz noted that baby boomers overtook millennials as the top generation of home buyers because they have more equity, more cash, and more urgent reasons to move.

Meanwhile, Zillow's 2024 consumer housing report slices the data differently and finds the largest age-band buyer group is 30-44-year-olds, with millennials at about 34% of buyers by that measure. The discrepancy between the two reports isn't a contradiction. It's a reminder that "heavy buyer" is a function of category structure and life-stage conditions, not brand loyalty.

In consumer spending, Numerator's data tells a similar story. Boomers and Gen X still lead U.S. CPG, general merchandise, and QSR spending. But Gen Z's spending share more than doubled from 2.6% to 6.1%, and millennials and adult Gen Z together now command 32% of spending, up 8 points since 2020. Heavy buyer pools aren't fixed. They shift as life circumstances, income, and category access change.

Practically speaking, the heaviest buyers in almost any category tend to be those with the most access, the most urgency, or the most resources. They got there through life circumstances, not because a brand loyalty program elevated them. And they can leave just as fast.

Why Targeting Heavy Buyers Is a Defensive Strategy

Marketers who over-index on their best customers are, in effect, defending ground rather than taking it.

Heavy buyers are already in the habit. They're already in your CRM. They're already buying at or near their natural ceiling. Byron Sharp put this plainly: heavy buyers will keep buying until something momentous changes. When it does, it's usually out of your control.

And the double jeopardy law makes this structural problem worse for smaller brands. Smaller brands don't just have fewer buyers. Those buyers also buy them less often. The path out isn't to squeeze loyalty from the existing base. It's to grow the base.

What does growing the base require? Mental availability: being the brand that comes to mind when a light buyer enters the category. And physical availability: being easy to find and buy when that moment arrives.

Jenni Romaniuk's framework of category entry points is directly relevant here. Light buyers don't think about your brand between purchases. When they re-enter the category, the brand that wins is the one linked to the right triggers. The job of advertising isn't to create fanatics. It's to slightly increase the probability that a light buyer chooses you in one of those moments.

For many product categories, the average buyer's daily probability of purchasing is very low. Advertising that shifts that probability even slightly, at scale, across a large population of light buyers, moves more revenue than any loyalty program aimed at heavy users. This probabilistic framing in Never Always, Never Never is useful for understanding why.

At AdVenture Media, this tension between targeting efficiency and reach shows up constantly in how clients think about audience strategy.

The Targeting Trap

Performance marketing made this problem worse by making narrow targeting feel responsible.

Lookalike audiences built around your best customers seem efficient. You're reaching people who look like your heavy buyers. What could go wrong?

What goes wrong is that you've excluded the light buyers. The occasional purchasers. The people who don't fit the persona but would buy if they encountered your brand in the right moment. Ehrenberg-Bass research on buyer personas vs product market fit suggests that over-reliance on detailed customer profiles often narrows reach in ways that actively constrain growth.

This is the trap: optimizing toward your best existing customers while underinvesting in the population that will determine whether you grow or plateau.

Les Binet and Peter Field documented this dynamic across hundreds of IPA Databank cases. Campaigns that prioritized broad reach and brand building outperformed campaigns focused on activation and loyalty over longer time horizons. The 60/40 framework they developed reflects this: roughly 60% of budget toward long-term brand building, 40% toward activation. The balance matters because each approach serves a different population. Activation captures demand from people already in the market. Brand building shifts probabilities for the much larger group who aren't in market yet.

Light buyers are mostly not in market right now. The whole point is to be ready when they are.

We covered how this plays out in practice in our analysis of how Celsius beat Red Bull by understanding light buyers, and it's the same dynamic visible in the Stanley Cup growth story.

The Actionable Conclusion

If you want more customers, broaden before you deepen.

That doesn't mean loyalty programs are worthless or that you should ignore your best customers. It means the return on investment from chasing incremental purchases across a large population of light buyers almost always beats the return from trying to convert light buyers into heavy ones through loyalty mechanics.

Applied, this looks like:

• Stop building every campaign around personas derived from your heaviest buyers. Those people are already buying.
• Invest in mental availability: the memory structures that make your brand retrievable when a light buyer enters the category.
• Expand your category entry points. The more situations that can trigger your brand, the larger your addressable pool.
• Measure reach alongside conversion. If your campaigns are highly efficient but reaching the same 5% of the population repeatedly, you're not growing. You're maintaining.

Your heavy buyers of tomorrow are today's light buyers. They're not in your CRM. They're not in your loyalty program. They're in the broad market, occasionally thinking about your category, mostly not thinking about your brand.

That's the opportunity. And it's much larger than your best customers list suggests.