You know, I spent a lot of my time working with both B2C and B2B marketers across a wide range of issues and challenges. But one of the ones that comes up more often than not, not surprisingly, today, is this question of personalization.
You know, one of the questions we hear all the time is our consumers even open to personalization in the first place? Yes, they actually are. So when we survey thousands of consumers around the world and asked them that very question, we find really two things that are especially important to understand?
The first is that a vast majority of consumers are either open to personalization or they're actually seeking it out, or at least are not opposed to it. Equally interesting and equally important to understand, is the fact that many of them actually expect the personalization. And that opens up some really interesting opportunities and maybe even a mandate from marketers to get personalization right.
You know, it's interesting because just because consumers are open to personalization doesn't mean that gives us free rein and license to do whatever we want in the name of personalization. So, not surprisingly, I think as a marketer, we all think oh then we got to get it right. We've got to get more accurate. If we're going to get more accurate, we need more data. So we do more analysis and the result of that, we then pile on the analysis. We pile on the personalization and then we fall into the other side of the trap, which is an out consumers think. Well, now you know, just a little bit too much. Now you're a little bit too creepy. And somewhere between the rock and the hard place of being inaccurate on the one hand, but too creepy on the other is in fact, the sweet spot of personalization.
When we think about this idea of personalization specifically designed to help consumers, it raises kind of two questions. What do we mean by help? What exactly does that look like? I think in many ways the answer is less is more and lead with help and the degree to which your consumer is perceiving that message to be helpful, first and second, really requiring as little data as possible in order to provide that personal help. That's where you really want to be, and we have a name for this. We call this not just help, but tailored help.
Some of the best examples of help that we have found in all of our research require very little data at all and in fact required data provided willingly by consumers themselves.
The Huggies brand, for example. So many of you will know Huggies is a well known diaper nappy brand. One of the things you can do on this website is you can plug in the birthdate of your child, and the entire website will redesign itself effectively to give you specific information, not just about diapers at different ages, but about your child at different ages. What to expect for that particular time period. It's one data point and is a data point that the parent chose to provide to the website.
So if we were to think about a recipe book for how to build tailored help, it's really three steps. The first thing we have to do is identify, but not identify the personalization opportunity, but identify the help opportunity. What specific kind of help are our consumers looking for? And then we can think about how we might design. How might we package that help in a particular communication to make it relevant to make it useful? And only then and after then what's with packaged the right kind of help? Can we begin to think about how a tailor that help along his few dimensions as possible to make it feel especially personal?
