Personalization has roots seeding from medieval times!

I have always looked at nature and history to find the answers to current problems facing the market. When designing a personalization engine, I looked at human psychology. After all, humans are a creature of habit.  

There are certain things engrained into our biological DNA. The need to search, explore, share, etc.  

Let me take you down memory lane.  

To understand how we've arrived at today's "social economy," we're going to have to step back in time to the original post-barter economy - that of the marketplace.

By "post-barter," we mean, of course, once transactions had got past the stage of "build me a house and I'll give you a couple of sheep" - or words to that effect. In short, we mean a time when people carried around with the symbols of value, commonly referred to as cash.

So rather than complicate things and go into how markets operated in Babylonian times, let's call this original economy the "medieval marketplace economy" because a) we can all imagine a medieval marketplace, and b) it's got a nice ring to it.

And without further ado, here we are at a medieval European market, held at regular, predictable intervals, like the Tuesday after each full moon. However, they organized things back then.

For sure, though: these market vendors organize their stalls to give potential buyers the best, most beautiful view of the goods on offer there.

But no matter how carefully, lovingly, and attractively presented those goods are, from rosy-red apples attractively stacked into precarious pyramids to the hambones hanging overhead from a crossbar, marketgoers had another way of deciding which stalls to visit.

Thomas, the greengrocer, always knew you visited his stall on Tuesday's and you loved Apples, so he made sure he would keep packed away a fresh batch for you every time.  

Call this personalization!

Shoppers at the same time also know which ones to avoid because the stallholder there isn't exactly averse to discreetly putting his thumb on the scales when weighing out produce.

And that other way of making a purchasing decision - and this is so important, both back then and now today – is listening to the opinions and advice offered by other marketgoers.

Let's return to the 21st century now, and look back at the medieval marketplace.

Understanding your customers is ever so important when you cannot meet and know them personally.  

During the medieval times, it was about connections - and keeping connected - with the social circle you no longer saw on an everyday basis.

The medieval marketplace, then, was a social experience. When it came to checking out the attractively-arranged goods on those market stalls, it would be an interactive experience, too: once you'd caught up on the news from and about family and friends, you'd ask your social circle at the market which would be the best stall there for those apples you needed, or that chunk of ham you were after.

And based on what they'd tell you of their experiences, you'd decide which stallholder to buy from, tell everybody you'll see them here again the Tuesday after the next full moon and head off to make that purchase.

I call this the ripple effect in the digital realm! 

It today's marketing speak, we call it brand awareness. 

However, all this changed, though, with the introduction of the first mass marketing broadcast methodology that didn't totally depend on word of mouth: the printing press. We moved into a profit-driven economy!  

There had always been individual marketing messages, painted on walls and on signs hanging from those walls: Pompeii, for example, had its wall paintings pointing the way to the self-appointed best brothel or tavern in town … or advertising the best fish stew in the district … or even doing a spot of political campaigning.

Now you could consider those particular marketing messages as a "one-to-many" marketing scenario, in that one single piece of information – like that wall painting - served to influence decisions made by many people.

For example, should they flock to that brothel … get tanked in that tavern … or even vote for C. Julius Polybius in the upcoming local magisterial elections? 

But with the introduction of the printing press, marketing went from "one-to-many" to "many-to-many" in that it was now a simple matter to print out dozens of copies of an identical sales message and nail them to the nearest tree, wall, door or available vertical surface.

Call it the birth of broadcasting, if you will.

Why, exactly, "profit-driven"? 

We call this economic phase "profit-driven" because, unlike the medieval marketplace model, the purchasing process was no longer on a person-to-person basis.

Producers and vendors were physically separate from their customers, and distant from them - both geographically and in terms of any kind of meaningful relationship.

And the distance between marketer and consumer remains an integral part of the online marketing equation.

With the ability to mine copious amounts of data from mobile apps, the website, and social networks, companies can use this to create a detailed psychographic profile of any customer. However, many still try the bucket effect, i.e., bundling all the data together to find a common trait. This is when you feel that you are being marketed a specific product because other people who look and feel like you may have bought one.  

It's important to remember that this method misses the human factor. To be personal! Remember Thomas, the greengrocer we talked about earlier, well, he knew each of his customers really well, and it was this personal touch and attention to detail that got him a lot of repeat business.

This same scenario can still be achieved if you start designing your personalization engines with a basic understanding of human psychology.   

Not so very long ago, people's instant access to detailed information about the product they were planning on buying was limited to radio and television commercials or advertisements in print. 

For a few hundred years, that was the time that the content and presentation of any product-related information you required was controlled by somebody else.

You could even call it a form of propaganda.

But today, information required to make an educated purchasing decision is no longer in the hands of people distancing themselves from consumers in their quest for profit above all else: that information is now very firmly in the hands of the consumers themselves.

However, too many companies today are still stuck in the 'Let's just broadcast our "Buy! Buy! Buy!" message' mentality that they've been in ever since they realized that they could use the printing press, and then radio and television to shout at consumers … and nowadays they're using social media to continue broadcasting that exact same shouty message.

Building a profiling engine and personalized recommendation engine that truly works is a work of art.  

The ingredients being:

• one part - being data-driven
• two parts - understanding human psychology
• three parts - removing the blinders (in the data science we geeks call it BIAS)
• four parts - tasting your mix (we call it the feedback loop, whereby your machine can learn from the interactions and effectiveness of recommendations on a real-time basis)

Humans are controlled by several factors, in terms of the things we do each day. Our actions, both online and offline, are governed by these factors. Using these factors and adding a different mindset to designing personalization engines will give your business the data required to optimize operations, reduce customer acquisition costs, increase retention, enhance customer experiences and finally make a healthier margin.  

&How Intelligence is a specialized consulting house that provides a strategic advisory role to our clients and the operational experience and knowledge required from ideation to implementation.

We help empower corporations to be the next market disruptor by understanding their data, enabling them to change the future.

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