The concept Mass Personalization refers to personalizing and customizing marketing to each individual consumer on a large scale. Personalization has many benefits, but broadly speaking allows marketers to cater marketing to individuals in ways that will most likely result in actual commercial behavior. This concept has been around for a while. What is new is the scale with which it can be carried out. We are getting closer to the point that all consumers can be targeted in a personalized fashion, rather than just those that have had a long enough relationship with a given business that their behavior is well known. This scale is a current aspiration, at least.
The concept of personalization is about content, timing, pricing and medium. Our profiles all tend towards certain behavior. We buy at certain times. We buy certain things. We like to research or view or actually purchase in certain places. We seek deals and discounts, or not, in certain ways. When marketers know enough about us, they can predict all of these behaviors. That type of information is now being collected at an unprecedented rate. Through places like Facebook and Google, all of our personal information can be collated with our online behavior. Our online behavior is increasingly becoming just our behavior, so knowing what this consists of tells a pretty holistic story.
I actually don't have strong reservations about this development. The idea that I would only be shown ads when I want them and for what I want is pretty attractive. In practice though, it still seems like I am still being delivered ads on a huge scale and basically just for things that I happen to have interacted with recently. For example, when I am on a site just researching a product that I am casually interested in, the ad for that product follows me everywhere, until it tapers off. I am pretty adept at ignoring these ads and rarely are reminded or encouraged to actually buy things.
My observation is that as quickly as marketers are learning how to reach us, we are learning how to distance ourselves from them. This dance will likely continue.
State of digital marketing
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