The Personalized Marketing Arms Race

A while back, I was in the market for a smartwatch. Like any consumer I researched a few smartwatch options like Misfit, Fossil, Samsung, Garmin etc. and finally chose a watch that I liked. I researched online but chose to pickup from store.

For the entire duration of my research phase and for the next few months, I was hounded by smart watch ads on every website I visited. I was bombarded with emails from the manufacturer promising free shipping for the smartwatches should I prefer to buy one. And all of this despite making the purchase.

It would still have been OK if it was just me seeing the ads. Things that I search for show up as ad’s on my spouses laptop and vice versa. So, we don’t need to tell each other of what we are thinking of purchasing. We know what the other is thinking of buying through the ads we see while browsing. So much for personal privacy.

As a consultant, part of my routine is keeping myself up to date on industry trends and latest thinking. I have a set of firms whose insights I regularly read and subscribe to. I also love playing casual games on my smart phone. So you can imagine my repulsion when I saw an ad of a firm I had recently visited show up on my game screen. The last thing I want to do is to be reminded of my professional research during my personal time.

I once searched for a new age wallet product couple of months ago. Despite the no purchase decision, I continue to get emails on 10% discounts, free shipping and an easy payment plan purchase option. This is after unsubscribing from the mailing list.

I am sure many of you have experienced something similar and slowly this creepy unsolicited marketing is becoming the new normal.

If we were to take a cross section of any industry vertical, pretty much all clients have their growth strategy centered around a digital presence with personalized and differentiated experiences for customers at the core.

Personalization, Hyper-Personalization, Omni-channel Engagement, Delightful Differentiated Customer Experiences, Meaningful Personalized Engagement.

Consultants continue to invent new adjectives, each more differentiated than the other and yet all of them are driving clients towards the same goalpost.

**A “digital” marketing arms race that does more harm than good when it comes to providing meaningful experiences to customers. **

There is a reason that most marketing ads, though driven by data, are inherently dumb.

Today’s marketing technology systems are built to detect customer “intent”. Whether one searches for a specific keyword, how frequent the searches are, what websites does one visit? – companies have sophisticated systems that allow them to decipher intent.

Unfortunately, that’s where the intelligence stops. There is usually a time frame for which the intent is active. It can be a day or a week or more. But intent is not forever. The systems of today are not intelligent enough to figure out both, the longevity of the intent as well as whether the intent was met/ completed or not.

So, when I had researched about smart watches, the manufacturer's marketing systems detected an “intent’. However, when I made the purchase and pickup from the physical store, the fulfillment of the intent was not tracked. Maybe there was a disconnect in systems where the digital data and eCommerce data were not bought together in informing the customer's actions.

**Systems lack the data and the intelligence to get the complete life-cycle of customer intent**.

This drives the scattershot marketing ads approach which is more creepy than thoughtful and personal.

This begs a few questions,

• How exactly should an intelligent marketing approach be in order to truly be useful for the customer and provide a delightful experience ?
• How can marketing become more intelligent in "intent management" than status quo?
• In a world of digitally fatigued consumers, what would be some good examples of delightful customer experiences?

Unless companies adopt a more minimalist and ethical approach to personalized marketing, we will continue to see bombardment of unsolicited ads and emails.

In the next set of articles, I will provide some more perspectives to these questions and on how we can improve personalized marketing.