Q. How might I find the Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) in the Canadian Fitness Industry?

Thanks for asking about trying to determine Customer Acquisition Cost in the Canadian fitness industry.

I will start with a suggestion for finding directions on what goes into a calculation of Customer Acquisition Cost, in case that's helpful. Then I will point you to some tools for finding the numbers you can use to make that calculation.

Defining and calculating customer acquisition cost

Customer acquisition cost is a specific element of business planning, so explanations you can cite on how to calculate it are most likely to be found in books that talk broadly about business planning. To search within the full text of books for the phrase 'customer acquisition cost', you are best served by searching an ebook collection. The biggest and most multi-disciplinary ebook collection we have is Ebook Central, which you can get to from the ‘Access to A-Z database list’ link >> ‘E’, just below the main search box on the RRU Library homepage https://library.royalroads.ca/

Use the advanced search screen do a search for ‘customer acquisition cost’. For more precise results select ‘matches’ in the drop down menu to the left of the search box, and narrow by publication date.

Below are two sample titles, to provide examples of what you can find.

Olsen, D. (2015). The lean product playbook : How to innovate with minimum viable products and rapid customer feedback. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated.

https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/royalroads-ebooks/detail.action?docID=4040191&query=%22Customer+acquisition+cost%22

Pride, J. (2018). Unicorn tears : Why startups fail and how to avoid it. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/royalroads-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5228523&query=%22Customer+acquisition+cost%22

To keyword search within either of these books to find the phrase ‘customer acquisition cost’, click on the book title in your results and then the blue ‘Read Online’ button just below the picture of the book’s cover.

You can then use the ‘search within book’ search box on the left.  Put quotes around the phrase to hold those three words together.

Calculating customer acquisition cost

While It is generally difficult to calculate CAC without figures on how, and how much, a business is spending, as well as information on their customers, the following tools can help you determine some industry averages.

All the business research tools we license on your behalf - and some freely available ones as well - are listed in our ‘Market and Industry research’ guide. You can otherwise get to this guide by scrolling down the RRU Library homepage and clicking on the ‘Business Research Guides’ block.

For industry perspectives, try:

• IBISWorld. Your search can be as simple as, ‘fitness’. Your results page will include Canadian, American, Chinese, and global reports, though there is a country filter at the top of your page if you want to get specific to one of those geographic areas.
• Statista. Your search can be simple here, as well. ‘fitness’ works well. The results rank Canadian reports more highly, but there is a country filter quite far down the left side of your search results that does a more precise job of focusing in on Canadian material.
• Passport. Again, start with a search for ‘fitness’. This tool is more useful for consumer goods such as cat food, cosmetics, or consumer electronics, but you could take a quick look anyway. They categorize fitness in under ‘personal services’ which is not very specific.
  • If you do choose to try Passport, here are two things worth knowing:
    • 1: It is a truly global database, so filtering your industry results by country is important.
    • 2: There are textual reports as well as market figures. Some people miss those reports. For more guidance on Passport, we have a whole other guide about using it linked from the Market and Industry Research guide I have already pointed you towards.
• Financial Performance Indicators. This freely accessible Statistics Canada tool provides average financial information (balance sheets, ratios) for Canadian business according to their industrial category. You can find your way to this tool from the ‘open access- Canada’ section of the 'Market and Industry Research' guide. A search for ‘fitness’ should bring back two NAICS codes (North American Industry Classification System) for which there are reports available. The longer the number you can find (up to six digits) the more specific the industry. But sometimes reports on specific industries have null-values in some of the cells because Stats Can is protecting privacy or there are statistical reasons Stats Canada cannot provide a reliable number. In cases like this, you may want to use reports that describe less specific industries.