Some thoughts for business and marketers to start communicating properly to Individuals rather than as Audiences, would be getting their involvement and eventually commitment in the creation of unique personas to their business. Once they start seeing the small wins based on the data and results, they might start understanding the difference in communicating to Individuals rather than as Audiences.

Just some thoughts from someone passionate on how we could help better understand the customers and create a better overall experience.

One other thing you might want to ask is how many of them actually have an analytics department/group. One thing I have learned from experience is that the ‘traditional’ Marketers sometimes have great ideas but are not analytical or tech savvy enough to convert that idea into action (My reference to traditional marketers here is towards folks that do creatives, ads, campaigns etc.). And if they don’t have the right analytical support, sometimes they turn to IT. But unfortunately, their IT counterparts might be tech savvy but not business or analytical savvy. So the whole excercise turns out to be a frustrating experience for the Marketer and they end up doing something either they know or something their agency recommended.

The model I have successfully followed is to actually have an analytical group dedicated to analytics that supports/partners/works with the traditional marketers I mention above. For the analytical folks this provides a platform to learn and broaden their knowledge, and for the traditional marketer this gives an opportunity to execute some of the ideas they might have or dig deeper (their analytical friends can help with this being more knowledgeable in SQL, databases, SAS etc).

Of course, interestingly enough, in the web analytics world these two groups are slowly fusing into one. More and more “analysts” are involved in campaigns and the like and the Marketers getting more analytical :-).

Anyway, just some thoughts :-). If I don’t put a hard stop here, my post might end up looking like a book. Like you and Avinash, I am deeply passionate about uncovering and executing on things that can help us understand our customers better and there is a lot one can do on that front.

Have fun at the Digital Lab.

Personally, I think people (perhaps driven from the IT side) make the process or evolution too complex, they try to reach for data mining or some idea that’s way beyond the skill sets and experience of the company. These kinds of efforts tend to fail under their own weight.

Another possibility, related to this complexity problem, is Marketing people simply don’t know what they would do with individual information, so there’s a failure to drive a precise and limited scale project as proof of concept. I’ve provided a lot of these test ideas over the years.

You are absolutely right – once the ability to report on Recency, for example, is gained, there is very little additional infra effort required, since this same metric is so flexible and can be used in many different ways. Perhaps that’s an idea to focus on and surface for people.

Thanks for the comment. I am looking forward to the Digital Lab at M.planet to play out some of these ideas in an interactive environment with Marketers from companies of all sizes and verticals!

However, I also think another reason for this is that addressing individuals needs more effort than addressing audiences. Many a times a new process might need to be set up, sometimes new information needs to be created (e.g a customer key), and sometimes information has to be consolidated etc. And my hypothesis is that (unless proven wrong) many a times folks just cop out of this extra effort and go with what is available without looking at a long-term vision. What many don’t realize is that yes, there is effort involved in the front-end, but once that basic infrastructure and information is there, there are tons of relatively simple things you can do (RFM being one) that will allow you to cherry pick customer targeting or do a better job of retention.