Marketers are obsessed with personalization. It’s heralded as the solution to standing out in the marketplace and earning the attention of your target audience. It’s baked into nearly every piece of technology we use, and it’s frequently pointed to when results are below expectations—”well of course the campaign wasn’t effective. It wasn’t personalized.”
Meanwhile, the public concern over data privacy is at an all-time high. Consumers are both more aware and more discerning with where they put their data and how they want it to be used.
I wonder if this endless chase of personalization is working against marketers’ desire to appear trustworthy and respectful of privacy. And apparently consumers aren’t as into personalization as marketers anyway. So what’s it all for anyway?
Obviously there has to be an element of balance here. Extreme personalization has privacy issues, not to mention the scale and efficiency challenges. But skipping even basic personalization probably won’t reflect well on your brand either. The answer to what the appropriate level of personalization is, as for most tough problems, “it depends”. It depends on how technologically savvy your audience is. It depends where on the spectrum they delineate helpful from creepy marketing. It depends if the personalization is adding real value or is just a facade.
My rule of thumb in tackling this problem is to ensure campaigns never “show the hand” of the data too much to the consumer. That even if I have access to all sorts of valuable activity and firmographic data, to focus on using it in strategic and subtle ways that enhance the campaign’s targeting and message without looking like big brother. And of course behind the scenes, ensuring all data is handled responsibly, with truly sensitive data avoided completely if possible.
We can’t chase personalization endlessly without recognizing its inverse effect on the perception of privacy. It’s a tight rope walk, and we’ve got to get better at it.