#BigIdeas2015: Meaningful interactions with customer !!

The act of connecting buyers and sellers is an ancient one.

Egyptian used papyrus to make sales messages. In Caesarian times, a Roman named Maius published in the Acta Publica one of the first known advertisements:

"For rent in the Arrio Pollian Block belonging to Allieus Nigidus Maius, shops with rooms above, second-story apartments fit for King and House. Apply to Primas, slave of Maius."

About 19 centuries later, the real estate advertisements aren’t much different in intent, so to speak. But they look awry in their delivery of message. Lot of untrue blabber and farce promotions have took quite a stronghold within the realms of such advertisements lately.

But just like ancient time, Even now one thing that really matters a lot to end-users is, dispatch of authentic & meaningful information about the products and services of brands at their quick disposal.

Now we do have cooler websites, engaging facebook & twitter pages coming up every now and then. But in this fast age of smartphone internet generation, as a marketer you need to reach your real customers at the right time in right place with right proposition, period!

In order to realize this ideal customer-reach mechanism, there has been a huge debate on Big Data going on around the world for past decade. Nobody can deny the usefulness and juiciness of customer sales-related insights one can draw from the enormous data that current market crop of digital world possess.

But that has its own shortcomings seeing its complexity and no of sources from where it’s coming. We will eventually have to look beyond online behaviour, cookies and data-driven approaches and need to dig deeper into the law of statistics – “Correlation doesn’t imply causation”.

Example: Since 1950s, both CO2 level and obesity levels have increased sharply. Hence atmospheric CO2 causes obesity, I mean REALLY !

It reminds me of Aristotle theory of men having more teeth than women after observing the study on horses. He himself had two wives and he didn’t bother checking the fact firsthand. Why? Because he didn’t feel the need for the same due to his syllogism, or as Bertrand Russell criticizes – a Bad metaphysics, and hence the false or laughable deductions being made every now and then.

If I have to take a modern example, It would certainly be the recent study by current E-com champion Alibaba analytics team which links the spending trends and patterns with the bra sizes of women. They committed the same syllogism as Aristotle – deducing something by combining two separately important facts (i.e those who buy large size bras tend to spend more) and merging them together and inventing a completely foolish argument. Well, that’s my opinion!

So even though market research and Big data are an important aspects, but there is one more aspect like intuition on which many pioneers bank upon- real world example which comes into my mind would be of Steve Jobs who was always against the market research-driven product insights. He used to believe, Customers don’t know what they want, and only pure intuition has worked for Apple and Steve for some landmark innovation in past 30-40 years.

However, The world has very less Jobs-type intuition approximations. And market research and Big data can hold the post for the future marketers warfare until then. Since I also believe that opposite fallacy of correlation is more dangerous- dismissing correlation entirely as if it doesn’t suggest any causation. That will be very unfair to some important scientific data we have collected so far.

No matter how prominently in more traditional sectors like healthcare, but even for the 21st century-born E-commerce sector- Big data and past-data behavioural insights can be utilized and it can be the key differentiator between the real corporate knights and mere foot-soldiers in coming time.

But to achieve this non-traditional feat, you can’t be using the same traditional ways of communicating and reaching to the customers. Under the smog of carpet bombing, customers are still listening intently for the right meaningful and contextual communication. That is the ancient trait of a customer which has hardly changed over the centuries. They are making their buying decisions paying attention to the right information and taking cues and reviews from their peers for their most of the purchases.

Take an example of Digital direct marketing industry. There has been so much saturation and over bombardment of promotional communication that you need to standout as a brand in your every single touch point with your consumer. Hence you should not just use standard personalisation, you should add more value and meaning in your communication with your customer.

There should be an effort to bring the same lost Caesarean meaningfulness & context in our advertisement discourse whether online or offline.

Time is ripe for the brands to take early steps in making timely meaningful interactions with their target segment to avoid being called a Spammer-brand or blanket marketers.

I hereby invite your feedback and comments on the topic!

Sources /Inspiration:

Wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotelianism, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation)

https://www.inc.com/zoe-henry/the-surprising-link-between-bra-size-and-spending-habits.html

https://www.chron.com/about/first-100/article/Chronicle-advertising-Ancient-techniques-for-2039166.php