Will 2013 Be the Year of Bespoke Marketing?

Will 2013 Be the Year of Bespoke Marketing?:from Business 2 Community by Biserka Anderson

 

This time last year marketing pundits were looking into the “crystal ball”, trying to discover trends that were likely to take the marketing world by storm in the year to come. Personalisation and context were then hailed as businesses’ most promising opportunity to reach and engage multiscreen users. But has this prediction materialised?
Sitting between the rising consumer demand for real-time bespoke services and increased privacy concerns, personalisation remains in its infancy but there are signs that it is likely to flourish in the foreseeable future, with smart software coming into being and companies blazing the trail of bespoke social engagement.
The rise of bespoke marketing
Andreas Weigend, former Amazon chief scientist, was quoted in a recent thought-provoking article in Marketing Magazine as saying: “Segmentation, not long ago the Holy Grail of marketing, is becoming an anachronism. Most people don’t want to be anonymous. Customers want to be treated as individuals and they are heading for platforms and companies that understand this.”
Above all, this statement highlights the potential of individual, bespoke marketing – in a context where marketers have access to data about users’ social, search and browsing behaviour, and where, more importantly, users demand a bespoke, relevant user experience, not tapping into this sea of opportunity is a deadly sin for businesses.
Is one-to-one personalisation an illusion?
Marketing Magazine describes the efforts made by certain trailblazers in the field, pointing out that personalisation is a complex concept which can mean any combination of behavioural targeting (as done by Google), the creative use of social graph data (from networks such as Facebook) and collaborative filtering (as practised by Amazon).
“If they have one thing in common, it is usually to replicate in the diffuse digital environment the kind of effortless familiarity with which, say, local shopkeepers might once have treated their customers,” the author, Adam Woods, points out.
However, while the majority of marketers seem to understand the concept of personalisation, saying they will increasingly seek to harness social data to deliver a better tailored web experience (Econsultancy Quarterly Digital Intelligence Briefing), when it comes to the implementation, social behavioural targeting proves to be a tough mission.
34% of the marketers in the Econsultancy study carried out in the summer say their CMS does not facilitate personalisation, with a mere 6% presently applying user social engagement data, instead opting for more traditional digital marketing techniques such as tracking browser history.
Businesses’ attempts at personalisation
Marketing Magazine offers a few examples of companies which have got personalisation right, and other who have not quite nailed behavioural targeting. Among the top performers is American Express, which delivers content and special deals to cardholders based on their Facebook likes. In the US, Groupon tailors newsletters to subscribers’ location and preferences using proprietary geo-location technology.
Some companies’ stab at personalisation has had a disastrous effect. Urban Outfitters, for instance, tested simple gender personalisation, displaying women’s clothes to women and men’s clothes to men, forgetting about those shoppers who may be looking to buy clothes for their partner.
So it looks like, aside from a few simple and stumbling attempts across the Pond, personalisation in its nascent form may still be out of reach for the majority of businesses, mainly due to technological limitations (not to mention red-hot issues such as consent and privacy concerns).
But with the advent of sophisticated marketing software such as HubSpot 3 in the autumn of 2012 and its impending integration with CMS provided by Ektron, the coveted bespoke cross-channel digital experience may be just around the corner.