Current digital offerings provide generic experiences and if there are forms of personalized content, it often suggests content or offers that are inappropriate or simply uninteresting. This is because brands attempted to provide personalisation without considering clients’ social identity, personality, underlying motivations and contextually relations. Digital makes this tangible for personalisation. What makes it even more challenging is the scale and velocity of the digital ecosystem(s) that makes it hard for businesses to understand what are the value-driven service offerings and to whom they are serving to. Although a few may begin to create rich online experiences building on emotional value-based connection with targeted personas, many are still leveraging outmoded approaches of segmentation and category targeting.
Understanding of the target client must be at the core of every great brand. In order to nurture, service, and retain client loyalty, the understanding of the clients must permeate throughout the whole organisation.
Drawing on decades of research models to understand and predict human behavior, one leading model known as “Big5” also known as “OCEAN” which represents: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. The intent is to assign a percentage score of each of these attributes to any individuals, thereby being able to develop the persona and the analytic insights.
It is vital to note that personalisation capabilities are about aligning the right product or service to the right client at the right time and situation. Business must take into account the different personalities of their clients in order to ensure personified experience. Context is king.
Failing to understand what makes people engross and comfortable with a particular brand or message tends to leave businesses competing in price which is ultimately a race to the bottom. The challenge of achieving this level of understanding requires businesses to continuously give up on margins as they try other means of attracting clients (e.g fee discount)..
It is evident that the missing link of clients’digital journey has been developing client understanding. Discerning the personality traits of clients and the motivation behind their digital behavior (“He is online even if he is offline”) is the key to a more personalized and relevant client journey promoting the overall brand experience. Investing in personalisation to encompass the entire client journey ensures greater client loyalty and integrating into the digital ecosystem of people who genuinely like the product(s), service(s) and/or brand.
The challenge is to understand the journey to achieve such personalisation especially in the digital ecosystem where clients’ are unknown, anonymous or inaccurate digital persona(s) are associated to an individual interacting via various digital mediums. The essence to achieve personalisation requires trust to be established or else you will never uncover and understand the true client ( see “Be your digital self …”). Personalisation must consider context with the appropriate timing.
Adoption to new technology and mediums along with new data sets are required in real-time and at massive scale in order for businesses to attain insightful information on the personalities and behavior of clients. This enables genuine personalisation in every aspects from service to product offerings..
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