Marketing as a discipline thrives on buzzwords, how many times have you heard or seen ‘Content is King’? ‘Big Data’? or even ‘nano-influencer’ or ‘geofencing’?
One term though has been consistent for a number of years and remains the Holy Grail for many a Marketer: Personalisation.
The body of evidence is clear, the more personalised marketing is, the more responsive it is, be that driving sales, enquiries or some other form of conversion.
This post is not about how to personalise per se, maybe that will be a later post, but it is about providing inspiration as there is growing ubiquity for meaningful and engaging personalisation in very simple, straightforward ways, often using nudge theory or our natural bias to make the ‘point’.
Let’s look at some examples;
NIKE
Nike set the tone in 2014, a full 5 years ago now, but the benchmark it set has long lasting reach. Nike are always a brand on the edge, one which concentrates on engaging its audience with quality marketing across the mix.
Their fitness app, and running monitoring / mapping have become a staple for Nike over the years but their use of personalisation in 2014 was ground breaking. It ticked many a marketing box, but at its heart it is great creative execution harnessed to great data insight.
Simply, they crunched everyone’s training data from the year and created a personalised video, and then shared it with their users – easy and devastatingly simple.
The personalisation aside – I liked the element of challenge added by Nike – a real life example of a well located ‘nudge’ and one where the context matches the theory neatly.
Have a look…
SPOTIFY
Spotify have been doing something similar and extended their idea in 2019 with some great engagement driven marketing that had two plays really … they created ‘my playlist for the year’ (see Nike inspiration) and then gave subscribers the opportunity to share their most listened to tracks and artists.
This is powerful and simple, and it was designed to enable everyone to share their own lists, and so support the bands and artists they love, the trick to success was making it very easy to download the visuals and then click to share.
This facilitated a broad engaging conversation between the artists and their fan base … and no doubt pushed streaming up at the same time.
Check out the detail here it is a great leveraging of the story bias … ignoring the cost of the subscription and crafting a story that you can share, and it plays a little, in the sharing element, to the confirmation bias we love as Marketers. This was noticeable to me as one of my top played artists in 2019 was Honeyblood, who shared lots of insta screen shots of people’s top 5s with them in it. This made me feel closer to the band and made me think I am listening to the ‘right’ band (they are great by the way, trust me).
M&S
The prompt for this post was the simple email shown below ..
How good did this make me feel! Yep, pretty smug as you can imagine.
It ignores the actual cost of my spend but focuses down simply on the amount I saved using their 20% off vouchers (whenever they come through).
I feel £97.30 richer, so it’s worked. On another level the Sparks card needs greater relevancy, something M&S have been open about. This use of data and the improved ‘birthday bonus discount’ are steps in the right direction in my view.
McDONALDS
Perhaps the cutest personalisation I have seen for a while is from McDonalds. A simple app let you film your own living room and superimpose a reindeer – a lovely extension of the TV advertising running at the time featuring the carrot hungry reindeer. The idea being you can then share with your children as definitive proof Santa does exist!
This is a long term play; parents will think better of the brand and children will love it and, I would suggest, remember it as well.
As always please feel free to leave any comments on my post.
Paul Hemingway
20 January 2020
Marketing and other thoughts 