In an era of information overload, brand explosion and low product loyalty, consumers and businesses are demanding more information that is personalised for their needs.
Marketing is moving from the mass market to the market of one - building a continuing and profitable relationship with individual customers. Finding out what individuals like and giving it to them.
Personalisation is an area of marketing that has been on the outer edges of the B2C marketing mix in the past, mostly due to high operating costs, and the fact that mass marketing techniques have met the needs. Now, modern technology and software is allowing many more organisations to consider personalising the way they talk to their customers and future customers. At the same time, customers, faced with no end of information, have a growing need to find the few products they really need, rather than 50 they slightly want. Without personalisation, organisations risk the competition reaching their customers with messages tailored to meet their needs, more effectively than mass marketing.
But where has all this come from? In the past, as marketing could only talk to the mass market that’s what it did, the mass marketing industry, created in America in the 20th Century, used the newly found mass media, radio and then TV, to talk to millions. Marketers were trained in mass marketing, practiced mass marketing and had the technology available to deliver the messages. Now, the internet has changed all that.
Early websites were little more than copies of offline sales and marketing materials – brochureware the geeks called it. Look back at web design in the mid-late 1990s and you’ll get the picture. This wasn’t personalisation.
Some sites, notably www.amazon.co.uk have always had tailoring. Amazon has been tracking your behaviour on their site and adjusting the recommendations to you personally for longer than any other big site. This works pretty well apart from the continual problem that all personalisation sites and equipment grapple with – identifying one individual and their personal needs. Known as the ‘my-TiVo-thinks-I’m-gay effect’ (Google it), we’ve all suffered from it. You order a nice book on knitting for Aunt Bessie for Christmas, and for the rest of time, the site you ordered it from offers you ‘Knitting Through the Ages’, and ‘How Knitting Changed My Life’.
The reality is that people are changing their needs. Individual information is becoming the most effective way of cutting through. The expectation is that your marketing messages will allow people to very quickly find what they want.
There’s no doubt that the Google boys were very forward-thinking when they realised that the key tool in an era of information overload was ‘finding stuff’. But now, while search is central to the marketing mix, not many people look beyond page 1 of the results. Unless you’re up there near the top of the left or right hand side of search results, the effectiveness of search is significantly reduced. (Sergey and Larry will be ok though, no need to worry).
So, we have the marketing quandary: messages delivered to individuals that are tailored based on their personal needs are effective; but the work required to capture people’s details and preferences is significant and has a cost. Plus, and this is perhaps more fundamental - personalisation for marketing requires the building of an ongoing relationship with the individual. Not just talking to them when you’ve got a campaign running, but continually feeding relevant information and messages to them so they get more value from your brand. So, campaigns go on forever, and production costs need to be managed to cover that.
And there’s another critical difference too – above we said feeding information and messages. Not just messages. What’s the difference? Information here is just stuff that customers find valuable. It doesn’t sell anything; it doesn’t even talk directly about your products. It builds the relationship. They love you more because of it. And if they love you more, they’re more likely to buy your stuff.
The extent that you, as a marketer, get into personalisation is a call based on your products, your market and your customers. Don’t rush into it, but don’t get left behind. Ah, right. Thanks for that.
Author: Mark Kelleher