Why Consumer Love Is The Ultimate Investment Signal
The consumer market has transformed. Gone are the days when prominent brick-and-mortar shelf space combined with massive linear television advertising budgets provided an overwhelming advantage to incumbent category-leading brands.
In the current, dynamic omnichannel environment, emerging brands can use myriad digital marketing strategies to directly reach consumers and quickly entice trial by selling directly online.
This shift has lowered barriers to entry and flooded the market with options. Emerging brands have more opportunity, but standing out and building lasting relationships is a challenge because customers are being bombarded with messages from every direction.
At Newcastle, we invest in established and growing consumer businesses. But how do we identify brands with true staying power? Put simply: by measuring consumers’ love for a brand and the brand’s love for its consumers. When this sentiment is reciprocated, we find happy, satisfied, and loyal customers, and resilient, healthy, and profitable brands that stand the test of time.
That’s because while great brand-consumer relationships start with a single transaction, they grow through a consistent commitment to understanding what consumers want and delivering what they need. When done with authenticity, differentiation, and quality, brands form satisfying emotional connections with their customers that keep them coming back.
Question #1: Do customers genuinely love the brand?
Understanding true customer love goes beyond surface-level metrics like sales growth or social media followers. Newcastle’s multi-dimensional approach measures the depth and authenticity of customer relationships.
The metrics that matter most reveal themselves in behavior patterns: How often do customers return? What percentage become brand advocates? How much of their category spending goes to this brand versus competitors? These questions drive our analysis, but numbers alone don't tell the full story.
Through our proprietary Brand Assessment, we integrate directly with ecommerce, social media, and marketing platforms to capture a holistic view of customer health. We track cohort retention, lifetime value evolution, and the velocity of repeat purchases. Our analytics and AI models transform these data points into predictive insights about a brand’s trajectory.
But data is just the beginning. We go deeper through social listening research, monitoring not just what customers buy, but what they say when brands aren't listening. We conduct proprietary consumer surveys and convene consumer panels to understand the emotional drivers behind purchase decisions. We also partner with creators and influencers who have their fingers on the pulse of consumer sentiment, gaining unfiltered insights into how brands show up in real conversations.
This 360-degree view reveals whether customers are merely transacting or truly connecting—a critical distinction for long-term success.
Question #2: Does the brand love its customers?
Customer love must be reciprocated. The most enduring brands don't just sell products; they obsess over customer satisfaction and continuously evolve to meet changing needs.
This starts with people and culture. We evaluate whether a company has built an organization that genuinely prioritizes customer feedback. Do they have systems to capture insights from customers, creators, and broader audiences? More importantly, do they act on what they learn?
True customer love shows up in research-driven product development, rigorous testing protocols, and speedy iteration based on real-world feedback. We look for brands that view failure as data, are humble enough to admit when something isn't working, and agile enough to pivot quickly. This commitment must be authentic. Customers can sense when brands are going through the motions versus when they're genuinely invested in making lives better.
We assess whether companies have built cultures of curiosity, empathy, and continuous improvement. Do they celebrate customer wins? Do they take ownership when they fall short? Are they transparent about their journey to serve customers better?
The best brands don't just respond to customer needs, they anticipate them, creating products and experiences that customers value more than they realized. This is how you delight your customers.
Newcastle's Consumer Investment Engine
Our systematic approach to evaluating brand-customer relationships leverages three core capabilities:
Data science & growth analysis: Our process begins with a comprehensive Brand Assessment, providing potential partners with multi-dimensional performance views against industry benchmarks. Our custom tools rapidly analyze customer population health, spending behavior, and marketing efficiency. Using our many-model approach, we strip away noise, home in on signal, transform raw data into actionable insights, and identify growth opportunities and potential risks early in our diligence process. We share these findings with potential partners to deliver immediate value and align on strategic initiatives that we can help advance.
Product & innovation lab: Numbers tell one story; experience tells another. We purchase and test products ourselves and seed them across our network, experiencing the full customer journey from discovery to daily use. Our team assesses intellectual property defensibility, evaluates product development pipelines, and taps into our Collaborator Network of industry experts for specialized insights. This hands-on approach ensures we invest in brands offering genuine innovation, not just clever marketing.
Performance marketing & Creator Council: Success requires efficiently reaching the right audience with the right message. We audit marketing effectiveness and identify advanced optimization strategies. Our Creator Council—a network of influencers and content creators—provides real-time insights into brand perception within niche communities. We don't just analyze; we activate, often running test campaigns during diligence to validate our hypotheses.
Case Study: Our partnership with Kizik
Kizik started with a question: how do we make it easier for people to put on their shoes? This noble mission led Kizik to pioneer today’s hands-free footwear category, which has exploded in the last few years. And at its core, Kizik embodies both sides of the love equation, which led us to make it our investment:
Customer love: Our proprietary surveys and cohort analysis revealed remarkable customer satisfaction. Kizik customers didn't just buy once; they became advocates, with exceptional repeat purchase rates and word-of-mouth referrals. Social listening showed customers describing Kizik shoes as "life-changing," particularly among demographics with physical limitations. Among consumers who had experienced Kizik shoes, hands-free features went from maybe the 6th or 7th most important purchase consideration to the #1 or #2 most important factor for future purchases.
Brand love: Kizik demonstrated a genuine commitment to customers through continuous innovation. Our team and Collaborators assessed their design and development processes, revealing a culture obsessed with solving real customer problems. Kizik’s early partnership with Nike wasn't just about licensing IP—it was about accessing world-class innovation and know-how to construct the best hands-free experience possible.
Most tellingly, we saw consumer-brand love in action when we invested our own capital into a creator campaign during diligence to test untapped audiences. The result? We generated actual revenue for Kizik with an impressive return on ad spend well in excess of what we were seeing from other benchmarks. This campaign wasn't just about proving marketing efficiency; it demonstrated that when authentic customer love meets effective storytelling, the results speak for themselves.
Built to last
In today's saturated consumer market, companies demonstrating growth alone isn’t enough to determine winners and losers. Loyalty—built on reciprocal love between brands and customers—is the foundation of enduring success.
At Newcastle, we believe the best investment opportunities arise when passionate customers meet purposeful brands. That relationship is where lasting value is created, and where we put our capital and expertise to work.
Kevin McCafferty,
Partner
Kevin has over 20 years of experience as an investor, operator, and entrepreneur. View profile.
