Personalized marketing has come a long way from, “Hello,” followed by the customer’s first name at the top of an email. Companies today have enough data to tailor brand experiences to each customer.
But a customer is not the same thing as a person.
For one thing, each person is a mess of contradictions and unpredictability. If you haven’t already, listen to Kara Swisher’s discussion of the Metaverse with Jaron Lanier, if only for the brief bit where they both hate on typing autocomplete as a form of limiting your future to what you’ve already typed in the past. I study a broad range of ecommerce sites for marketing research, and it’s always interesting to watch Google’s predictive engines struggling to decide what articles to feed me. Is easily distracted digital me more interested in water-proof running shoes, a Lego set, or a commercial pizza oven? The value of a pet supply store that’s customized itself around exactly what you like to buy for your dog diminishes greatly when you need something for your cat.
The key to effective personalization is not confusing it with actually knowing your customers.
Empathy has always been a part of good customer service, but to do it at scale requires a new kind of listening at scale. As Seth Godin points out, “Mass personalization is a trap,” but it’s also dehumanizing. That’s not just business-bad; it’s bad-bad. The important thing is to understand that personalization is built on demographics and psychographics, not empathy, so what these marketing profiles create isn’t so much a person, as a kind of flickering, digital avatar in the shape of our shopping habits, interests, location, household income, and relationship status. As a company, you need to know that when you’re engaging with that, you’re not engaging with the actual person.
The weird part is that, now more than ever, we’re in charge of our own misperceptions. As we move into a new, post-creepy era of digital marketing that began with the General Data Protection Regulation in Europe and California’s privacy act, and got real with Apple’s iOS updates, marketing is increasingly adopting voluntary forms of data collection–what’s commonly described as “zero-party data,” or data provided directly to the company by the user. Facebook knows your birthday, because you told Facebook your birthday.
But Facebook doesn’t know you, and neither do the companies you provide data. Do you celebrate your birthday, or dread it? Did you lie about the year you were born? Did you input a completely random date because you just needed to set up an account in a hurry? That little version of you is out there now. It doesn’t necessarily have a social security number or a credit score, but somebody is probably trying to sell it something.
In Mother Night, the great Kurt Vonnegut Jr. wrote, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
But can we? You don’t have to search very hard to find examples of ways social media algorithms change us. Now, more than ever, it’s awfully easy to become what we pretend to be, and it’s equally easy for companies to chase that invented and superficial persona instead of focusing on the actual human being. Regardless of what we pretend to be, the best companies will continue to focus on the person inside the personalization.
