Consumers may not want a relationship with your brand…
I know, I know. This doesn’t sound like good news.
When I share this insight with marketers I work with every day, it’s pretty disheartening given the amount of time, effort and expense put against that goal. Most marketers (87%, CEB 2018 State of Personalization Survey) are using some form of Personalization as a key strategy to develop such a relationship with today’s distracted, fickle consumers. The thinking is that through Personalization, brands can progress down the road to a meaningful relationship with the consumer. Personalization offers the promise of breaking through, connecting, strengthening that connection, selling, selling more (!), and ultimately, creating that lasting consumer:brand relationship. Ah… love at last.
And yet, we learned that consumers may be looking for something entirely different.
Our research indicates that consumers are really looking for Help: help in terms of helping them get whatever they are trying to get done, done.
Help wins. Help wins for consumers and it wins for brands.
And the most impactful Help is something we are calling, “Tailored Help.”
This is the kind of Personalization consumers reward brands for based on Gartner’s robust research on Personalization, published last year: “Rethinking Personalization for Maximum Impact” (Tailored help delivers a +20% bump in commercial benefit when moving from bottom quartile performance to top quartile performance).
If you haven’t had a chance to learn the insights from this research, please reach out and I would be delighted to share the powerful findings and implications from this research with you and your team, including how to create this kind of Personalization.
But the story doesn’t end here.
Because consumers continue to evolve in terms of their expectations of brands, how they interact with brands, and how they use technology along the many touchpoints they have with brands, we have to continue to evolve too, to keep up. To stay relevant and impactful. To drive commercial success.
This is where your experience can help us help you.
We are kindly asking that you participate in our new Personalization survey if you are a marketing leader for a B2C or B2C/B2B Hybrid brand.
Our insights and ground-breaking research is possible in part because of what you share with us. Your perspective, the lessons you’ve learned, your successes and even the failures you experience help inform Gartner research.
Please take 10-minutes today to take our 2019 Personalization and Execution Survey. By doing so, you are exercising a bit of self-help. After completing the survey, you will receive a benchmarking report that compares your performance to your peers as well as first-priority access to the newest Gartner research on personalization. Survey is open till May 20th.
That’s the kind of help that I expect you’re going to love.
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