As companies get more plugged into the concepts of lifestyle marketing and the power of content customization, they get better at integrating personalization into their targeted marketing campaigns. But it is important to understand that targeting and relevancy are not the same thing. With targeting, it’s easy enough to know that a certain group of people – say (speaking of relevancy), New England Patriots fans should be included in a sports apparel campaign. But which item to promote, from the Tom Brady game jersey to a Bill Belichick hoodie, is a much trickier call. Smart technology can help marketers crack the code…take a look:
Blackbox Analytics – like IBM’s Watson from Jeopardy fame, knowing what to show when is based upon a complex algorithm of processing and relating massive volumes of data. Many of these approaches will be self tuning based upon data input and be obscured from the marketer.
Personalization – is driven by static, known attributes. Filling in the right name in a salutation (i.e., Dear Mr. Smith), organizing content around expressed preferences, etc.
Recommendations – focuses on displaying lists of products based on a predictive algorithm. Netflix and Amazon are the two best known examples. Display can be implicit, i.e., which items appear when on the home page, or explicit as when likely lists displayed with an item or promoted via an email.
Relevancy – spans into the content spectrum and covers both personalization and recommendations. Also, uses same algorithmic type approach used in recommendations and Blackbox Analytics.
Read the Experian Marketing Innovation Report 2012 for more insights on this topic and many others that are important to marketers over the coming year.