奇怪的个性化营销

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奇怪的个性化营销
The moment digital selling tips over into creepy stalking (716 words)

by Andrew Hill, February 2, 2015 12:19 pm

The ‘creepiness quotient’ is a vital sales and marketing metric

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While I flew to Barcelona last week to speak at a conference, my iPad was at breakfast at a restaurant in Cambridge. That, at least, is what I deduced from the device’s location, transmitted to me after I activated the Find My iPhone app on my mobile phone.

I was relieved: the tablet was neither lost nor stolen; it had been accidentally picked up by the organisers of a meeting I had attended the previous day. If, however, another app had found me at the airport and started to badger me with offers, based on my movements, prior purchases and reputation as a loyal or fickle customer, I might have felt a little uneasy.

Here is a question companies increasingly need to answer: what is the creepiness quotient of your product, or marketing campaign, and how would you know? The problem is no secret. Public examples abound. They include embarrassing personalised marketing gaffes — encapsulated in the popular, but possibly apocryphal, tale of the retailer Target, which outed a pregnant teenager to her parents by pitching certain products to her — and the more recent suspension of sales of Google Glass, amid queasiness about the device’s potential misuse. “Problem” may even be a misnomer. While Julia Angwin’s recent book Dragnet Nation describes the dark side of surveillance by companies and governments, a new book by Michael Fertik, founder of Reputation.com, which offers ways of enhancing online reputations, sees it as a simple fact of modern life, which we can exploit for advantage.

In The Reputation Economy, he and co-author David Thompson lay out plenty of examples that I find creepy. They include Facedeals, which aimed to combine facial recognition and your Facebook profile to push special offers to you when you arrive at a shop. Another is Moven, a mobile payment app, which originally set out to score customers’ social media credibility alongside traditional credit measures.

“Future legal cases will have to decide at what point digital stalking gets just too creepy,” Mr Fertik and Mr Thompson write. They recommend, instead, that you publicise recent job promotions on social networks, tweet about your forthcoming purchases (“Looking for new SUV, considering @BMWUSA or @MBUSA, any experiences?”), and reconcile with bitter ex-partners who have badmouthed you online — all in the interests of making algorithms think you are a successful, luxury-car-loving, perfect date.

Research used to show personalised marketing was persuasive and well received. But Lisa Barnard, who once worked in advertising and is now assistant professor at Ithaca College, ran some experiments aimed at identifying the creepiness quotient (she calls it the “creepiness factor”) in ad campaigns. Tailoring online advertising to individual behaviour still works, she found, but “perceived creepiness” makes customers 5 per cent less likely to make the purchase. That is 5 per cent of the budget that could be spent elsewhere, if a campaign’s CQ could be cut to zero.

Even pioneers recognise personalisation has its limits. Facedeals has become Taonii, an app which still offers tailored deals, without face recognition. “Consumers were just not quite ready,” a spokeswoman said via email. “They wanted the benefits but in a slightly friendlier [way].”

Keith Weed, chief marketing officer of Unilever, the consumer products company, says digital personalised marketing is “a bit like when you to go to your local shop and they know you and perhaps even have what you want waiting for you”. But cosy as that sounds, he concedes that getting the online and mobile version right is “a fine balance”. For now, giving customers an easy opt-out and ensuring they know what will be shared, where and with whom, are the keys to not creeping them out, he says.

Going back to William Lever, Unilever’s founder and early adopter of persuasive advertising, marketing has a history of constant experimentation, in which you and I are the guinea-pigs. Rapid evolution is inevitable, because the line between creepy and friendly is always shifting. A user may willingly give up information for one purpose, only to react with disgust when it is used for another. But companies owe it to their customers to come up with a better way of defining their creepiness quotient. Otherwise, deciding where “cool” becomes “eeugh” will continue to be a matter of trial and uncomfortable error.

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