In honor of the Mad Men Season 6 premier this weekend, we’d like to take this moment to take a walk down Marketing Memory Lane, From mass marketing to demographic segmentation to customer segmentation to personalization. And now with Nectar, hyper-personalization.
Before the era now inextricably linked with Don Draper, all consumers received the same products, the same messages and the same ads, in the same medium(s). As Henry Ford once famously said, “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black.”
Then came those famous Ad Men (and yes, they were mostly men) of Madison Avenue. They realized that men and women actually hear, read and remember things differently. So these Mad Men placed “male-oriented” products, like aftershave, in sports magazines or the sports section of the newspaper. Products “for women” were advertised on TV during the middle of the day, thus the term “soap” opera, a tip of the hat to sponsor Procter & Gamble and their detergents. This demographic segmentation became more and more specific as time passed, differentiating marketing for marrieds vs singles, high income vs low, urban vs suburban, black vs white, and so on.
As companies began to gather more and more data on their customers and computers became increasingly powerful, smart businesses realized there was an even better way to market. Customers could be grouped into similar segments and marketed to according to their similarities. After all, not all women are created equal. Some of us like brand names. Some of us refuse to buy anything without a coupon. And some of us try to shop as infrequently as possible–hard to believe, but we exist! The hypothesis was that If brands could speak to each segment in a way that resonated with that segment, customers would buy more. And they did! Segmentation not only improved customer loyalty, it also reduced the cost of doing business.
With the advent of the internet and the wealth of data it provides, targeting has become increasingly defined. Savvy companies track not only customer purchases, but what customers are looking at when they are on the brand’s site. Some even combine internal digital data with bricks & mortar data. All this data allows businesses to relate to their customers more effectively. This 0ersonalization is the precursor to hyper-personalization.
But what if a brand could speak to a customer on an individual level, aka hyper-personalization? That’s what Nectar’s proprietary software allows brands to do! By combining all digital data available (purchases, online and email click behavior, CRM data, mobile, and so on) with social information, companies can now market to their customers in a 1:1 manner, yet do it at scale.
Today, we may go to the office in blue jeans rather than dapper suits, we may no longer be able to smoke wherever we please, we may not be able to have the 3-martini lunch anymore, but we can speak to our customers in a way that’s much more relevant for them: hyper-personalization. Now, please excuse me, so I can go spend an hour with Don Draper. Cheers!
