Pervasive Personalization

Recently, I was in a discussion with a young, innovative and talented marketing researcher. An energetic young man with international education and commitment to work in Nepal, he shed light on an important and emerging phenomena in marketing and business promotion – personalization.

The young man discussed about a project he had done with an airline to divert travelers on a particular from competition to his client who had started service on that sector recently. With an ingenuous idea, they setup a free hotspot on the departure lounge of the domestic terminal, collected phone numbers, flight numbers and boarding card as part of registration to that free hotspot. Based on that data and the analysis of that, they created specific campaigns to personally solicit the travelers to the flights of the client.

Hey, you travelled via this airline to this place last month. We are offering a cheaper ticket and more mileage. Please travel with us. And so on and on. According to him, the campaign was very successful.

If I were to walk into a store and the store front-door were to welcome me personally, I would be happy and want to shop there and more likely than not, visit again. I would feel respected and valued. What if the same system tracked my visits to e-commerce sites and what I searched there to use that information to recommend a similar product at a bargain price in the store? The chances of me doing that purchase would increase significantly.

The current Internet content is already deeply personalized. Not only the social media pages but also the portals of e-commerce sites, sites of enterprises offering different products & services and even the generic sites such as news portals are getting more personalized. You can either select the bits and pieces to customize your own version of the portal or the system automatically customizes it based on your recent activity inside the portal or outside of it. Even that is not static. The portal keeps on changing and coming nearer to your actual taste based on your prior activities.

The level of personalization is moving beyond the pages and portals. They are even using videos to promote and push their messages to end users through specifically personalized clips tailored to the interest and activities of the individual. According to Forbes.com, one such campaign by Nike+ in 2014 was a very successful one. In it, Nike created personalized digital videos and pushed them to more than 100,000 of its members. Personalized videos, customized web portal widgets, interactive chatbots etc are some of the tools used to enhance personalization and engagement between the enterprise and the individual.

You might have seen many promotion of gift items, products and services specifically tailored to the birthday, anniversary or specific occasion of yours, your spouse, children, friends or relatives. It would not be that surprising if one of these days you walk into a store in Singapore and the store billboard welcomed you by recognizing your face, looking up your social media profile and offering you a product available there based on your interests and recent purchases as obtained from social media, e-commerce portals or other similar web services. Might look magical and otherworldly for the uninitiated but that is where the cyberspace and e-commerce is heading to.

It is not only in the cyberspace where personalization is pervasive. In the sector of education, healthcare, entertainment and even medicine, the trend is to personalize and leverage on the engagement with each individual. Personalized doses of medicine specifically tailored to the patient’s need and delivered via a special dispenser device or similar mechanism is one possibility being vigorously explored by the medical and pharmaceutical sector. Though they are not directly related to cyberspace, they also make use of the intelligent computing infrastructure to come up with the suitable model of the system to deliver such deeply personalized services to the end users.

As this fine-tuned personalization pervades everything around us, we might also find ourselves increasingly exposed and in many cases, vulnerable. We shall be living in a glass house with all our activities visible to the whole world. Perhaps there is a sinister side to it, a near Orwellian society in which the big brother knows everything. In this case, the big brother would not be an individual but the big players in cyberspace and industries leveraging on cyberspace. While you might feel honored and privileged at receiving your deeply customized offer, you might want to contemplate how that thing could know so much about your personal life.