Stop reacquiring the customers you already have: Rajesh Jain at Pitch CMO Summit 2026

Rajesh Jain, Founder and Managing Director of Netcore, used his spotlight session at the Pitch CMO Summit 2026 in Mumbai to make a pointed argument: the biggest source of waste in marketing today is not bad creative or poor targeting, it is the money brands spend reacquiring customers they should never have lost in the first place.

Jain opened with a framework he called Best, Rest and Next. Best customers (typically the top 10 to 20%) are those whose lifetime value a brand must maximise. Next customers are those being constantly acquired. The middle segment, which he called the Rest, is the one most often neglected. "They are the drifting and the dormant," he said. "They end up being tomorrow's reacquisitions, tomorrow's next customers. That's really where ad waste happens."

He anchored the argument in three macro trends. Customer acquisition costs, he said, have risen by at least 40% over the past two years. Site traffic has fallen between 15 and 50% over the last year, citing Forrester research, driven in part by the rise of AI search engines pulling users away from brand-owned properties. And the average human attention span, he noted, now clocks in at under eight seconds, which is less than that of a goldfish. "The problem," he said, "is how do you convert intent to purchase in eight seconds or less."

The answer, in Jain's telling, lies in moving from campaign-based communication to real-time, data-driven conversations. He walked the audience through a layered demonstration using a coffee brand message as his example. A generic broadcast: "Hey coffee lover, check out our latest international brews," transforms, step by step, as more data is layered in. Transactional history and engagement data make it personal. Weather data and category context make it timely. Individual behavioural signals make it precise.

By the final iteration, the message reads: "Ravi, your rain day playlist deserves an honest Ethiopian brew. Tap and pre-order your 8.25 AM pour over with your favourite croissant to kickstart your day." "Aren't these messages getting better?" Jain asked. "More likelihood of your customers interacting with them. All the data we've talked about is already available to you. The question is, how do you take that and put it into messages at the right time to the right person?"

He then presented a live case study from Crocs India, a Netcore customer, to show what this looks like in practice. Facing a BOGO sale (a promotional event that typically accounts for 60 to 70% of Crocs' annual revenue) with a reduced budget, the brand deployed what Jain described as a co-marketer: an orchestration agent coordinating multiple specialised AI agents across insights, segmentation, content creation, and scheduling.

The segmentation agent alone produced highly specific micro-segments that, Jain said, "no human is going to be able to do. It's an impossible problem for a human." Content was then created for each micro-segment across WhatsApp, email, SMS, RCS, and performance marketing channels, with a human in the loop for approval at each stage. "All of what I'm showing you would have ordinarily taken Crocs two weeks," he said. "This was done in two days."

The results were significant. The AI multi-agent approach delivered 13x higher ROI compared to non-AI campaigns, while predictive segmentation produced a 10x increase in ROI relative to standard targeting methods. Netcore-powered campaigns now consistently generate over ₹50 lakhs in monthly revenue for Crocs India, contributing 7 to 8% of the brand's total business revenue.

On the channel level, affinity-based segmentation on WhatsApp delivered 3x ROI over standard segments, and propensity modelling on email lifted conversion rates from under 1% to 3.5% within a single month. Shivani Dewan, Lead of Digital Marketing at Crocs, noted that the AI-based affinity segmentation "far outperformed our traditional segments" and that Netcore's hands-on support "ensured everything was executed smoothly and delivered real results."

Jain also flagged the emerging importance of large language models as a discovery surface. With shopping agents beginning to mediate product discovery before a user ever reaches a brand's website or app, he said, brands need to ensure they are accessible and findable within LLM environments. "Your shopping journey is going to begin there," he said, "and you need to be available there."

He closed by distilling his framework into what he called the two nevers. "Never lose your customers, especially your best customers. And never pay twice for the same customer." He urged marketers to reframe how they think of their function entirely. "Think of yourself not as chief marketing officers, but as chief AI and chief profitability officers in the business. Marketers today are the controllers of profitable growth. No other cost can be controlled. Marketing is the only cost."