The Marketer's Challenge: Personalisation at Scale

“Consumers are hugely empowered. There is no room for mediocre,” said Keith Weed, Unilever’s Chief Marketing Officer at last week’s European Forbes CMO Summit. “We now have the opportunity to understand people on a one-to-one basis – to get down to that individual engagement.”

Personalisation is no new concept. You probably remember a time when you have searched for a one-time buy like a sofa and even after you’ve purchased it, the retailer will be following you around digitally and pop up with sofa ads each time you open a browser, trying to sell you the same thing. And all you’re thinking is “I’ve already bought it. I don't need any more sofas!”

Those days of un-personalised targeting and seeing ads for things you’ve already purchased are hopefully coming to an end for us. The power of personalisation today gives retailers a real opportunity to deliver one-to-one experiences at scale using Artificial Intelligence. With the explosion of data that we have access to today, AI can crunch that data and in turn those insights can be used to offer up more personalised customer engagements and experiences than ever before. The first stage of that is to centralise the data, create an accurate data supply chain and asking the right questions of the data. Traditionally, audience segmentation involved bucketing customers into basic categories, such as gender, age and disposable income. All groups were then served email marketing campaigns with their own names at the beginning or ads based on what it was believed they would be interested in and marketers were able to tick it off as personalisation.

The way we think about audience segmentation is massively changing and the quicker we embrace this evolution, the quicker we will be able to get our data to work for us in creating true personalisation at scale at an individual customer level. For example, there is a lot to learn about customers from how they want to present themselves to the world through their social media posts. StoryStream, an AI-powered content marketing platform, enables retailers to analyse 25,000 dimensions per image and billions of data points in text, imagery and video to extract those hidden insights. Their Social Tribes platform enables retailers to find hidden audience insights by analysing social media imagery and then splitting them into Social Tribes based on what can be observed about them through their social media posts.

As Dr Janet Bastiman, Chief Science Officer of StoryStream points out, “I’m regularly mistargeted because of my age and gender. According to advertisers, I shouldn’t be interested in the latest smart home devices or offers on hardware. Instead I regularly get targeted items on crafts, baby items and even divorce lawyers! Traditionally, audience segmentation was done by categories such as age, gender and disposable incomes. Today, retailers need to be looking at how their customers actually want to engage with them and look at what they’re interested in. Social Tribes enables retailers to build tribes of people that can be identified by their interests, whether that be Gym Selfies, Sneaker Heads, Sci-Fi or anything else enabling them to know their customers and prospective customers at a really deep and individual level.”

Read the rest of this article at Forbes.