Breaking Through the Digital Clutter with Data
In a recent article in the Harvard Business Review, research revealed that marketers have been spending more on traditional advertising than in previous years. The hypothesis is that since consumers are spending so much of their time online, they’re (we’re) “becoming numb to digital advertising clutter”, therefore marketers are looking to cut through the noise.
It’s all so short sighted.
Is it possible that marketers and those who oversee their KPIs are sometimes missing the point? My hypothesis is that it’s not the medium of digital advertising that consumers are becoming numb to. The problem is that people are tired of being objectified and feeling they have no control over the content pushed at them day in and day out in different mediums, channels, devices.
Don’t you dare look at anything.
Should you look up anything, you may find that thing/service/idea/gift/ following you in ads across channels. And sometimes, it may seem like you have no control. You can’t zone out in any digital place without being reminded of something you looked up before? You can look up something serious and consequential and be faced with it during your leisure time when you just want to disconnect from work and other serious matters. And dare you shop around a site, you may be hounded with emails to return and make a purchase. Planning to go to a store to pick up a bunch of items? Adding items to your shopping cart may trigger reminders to check-out! Check-out! Don’t forget your cart!
We do so much sleuthing around and hypothesizing about how get people to do what we want them to do, that we de-humanize digital experiences. Even with the annoying word phygital - we fail to connect our natural human behaviors to how digital.
Here are some examples:
Going shopping for clothing can be difficult with a child. All those clothing racks are draped with interesting things to touch and make for great hiding places! Trying to concentrate on finding styles, and sizes, and trying things on when 90% of the fitting rooms are bizarrely roped off, are all reasons that shopping on an app before going to the store can quite practical! But while scrolling through items, being distracted by the physical space we’re in - being interrupted by life, often leads to triggers like “don’t forget to check out”, “hurry your size is almost out of stock”, “looks like you forgot something”. And sometimes when you do go back to your cart, you learn that there was a time limit for how long items could be left in your cart. And not only are they gone, there’s no way to quickly repopulate the cart. And since the search is so laborious, you decide to go to Google to search by “store name” and the descriptionof the items that were in your cart.
And whether you checked out or not, the ads are coming. The emails are coming. And not just emails to accusing you for forgetting to check out - you’ll soon find you’ve been SUBSCRIBED to emails for which you must now opt-out.
How do you respond?
I asked people that work in digital marketing and technology like myself and most of them said that they would delete emails, label email sender junk, unsubscribe, ignore ads, block ads, and often times look elsewhere to make a purchase if they’d been annoyed enough. This of course is most brutal when a loyal customer is chased away by such invasive experiences.
Just think, can you imagine someone coming up to you in a shopping mall to tell you, you forgot to check out? Or that the sweater on the hanger you picked up is almost out of stock? Of what if you returned to your car to find all the stores you visited had gone and left brochures on your windshield or were waiting at the train station to get your email. Absurd!
But it’s personalized!!
My view is that just because my name is used, and just because your message includes something I have looked at, doesn’t make it PERSONALIZED. That’s not what consumers want. They want to be understood. They (we) want or welcome assistance in solving our problems. When I go to a website and it accurately suggests that based on previous purchases my ideal size would be X - that’s personalization. When a brand sends me a message after I have received the product I ordered to give me more information on using it, to make sure I am satisfied, to ask me if I would like to register for emails at a cadence defined by me and with a discount to use on my next purchase, that is palatable personalization. When a store recognizes that I shop for clothes on the app almost only on weekend mornings, and so they send me notifications at that time, that’s personalization. When brands for which I would buy items only a few times a year, send me emails daily at 7am, I think they’re self-centered, out of touch, and annoying.
Segmenting, profiling, targeting
When you are using digital marketing tools to define groups, to find look-a-likes, and to target with your messaging - stop and think about how you are going to prevent people from severing their relationship or from considering alternatives because your actions are deemed inappropriate or annoying?
Increasing value in individual profiles
It may seem laborious when you hear of individual profiles in Sitecore CDP. But it should give you inspiration. If you can segment and identify look-a-likes and test actions and reactions with granularity - then this is a path to protecting your investments. As marketers we should get used to finding ways to define the risks and costs associated with making the wrong decisions, we should use profiles to discuss and educate others about the way that people react.
Use real profiles in meetings
Imagine bringing real profiles to the table, to the virtual meeting shared screen, to discuss success and failures. To hypothesize around real data about real individuals. People make much better decisions when they have data about real people. Especially when you have people from different departments coming together to discuss action plans - it’s much more interesting for everyone to have concrete examples to work through.
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