Data-driven, personalisation, programmatic are all buzz words in our industry at the moment. Using digital and ‘big’ data to create experiences that are tailored to individuals and their behaviours and the rise of programmatic, mean that we can now tailor brand-building campaigns at scale to individuals. And this is all great, right?
Of course it is. Get this right and we provide experiences and interactions that are in the right place, at the right time, targeting the right people, even in today’s digital and fragmented world. But getting it right is tough and the consequences of getting it wrong are massive. Aimia surveyed 2,000 people last year and found that a massive 57% of them actively avoid brands that bombard them with marketing messages and one fifth said they can’t cope with the current volume they receive.
And it seems that the marketing industry think that we’ve got this nailed. In a study in the US last year, IBM found that 8 in 10 marketers feel that they have a holistic view of their customers across interactions and channels.
If this is true, then the future is bright for our brands. However, we hear countless tales of badly targeted ads or re-targeting based on one search six months ago, and the rise of ad blockers continues, so where’s the disconnect? We asked 250 Britons how much brands across different categories understand their individual needs and we found a very different picture.
We found that, on average, only a third of us think that brands understand their individual needs across different sectors. And levels varied hugely from 40% of us think that supermarkets understand us as individuals but only 23% think that retail banks understand them as individuals. So perhaps we’re not quite as close to our customers as we should be.
And that’s why insight needs to be at the centre of what we do as marketers. Brands need to know their audiences, understand their motivations, when to talk to them with what messages and, above all, we need to pair brilliant consumer insight, with fantastic data analysis and first class strategic planning. Without insight and understanding of people and their behaviour, we are destined to deliver experiences that are not reflective of real lives today and that do not deliver on the relevance that is absolutely crucial to be part of our customer’s lives.
