Seth Godin’s got a great podcast episode on pizza. He talks about the endless pizza options across this country. And yet most of it is terrible. Because pizza is made around convenience. Convenience for the customer, and convenience for the person making it. Easier ingredients. Shortcuts in the kitchen.
But convenience, for all its merit, tends to be the antithesis of quality (at least in this example). And you see a similar tradeoff where marketers are increasingly pursuing personalization, yet are trying to do it at scales never achieved before. At times it feels impossible. Combine that with the fervor around ABM, a practice entirely built around good targeting and personalization. And yet one of the most common questions about ABM is about how to scale.
And I’m not sure you can, past a certain point. Because as you scale, you start to trade quality for convenience. Convenience for the marketer’s time. Convenience for the budget that can only stretch a dollar so far. All at the expense of the quality the end user sees. Maybe not in terms of the physical paper quality of the direct mail piece they’re sent, or the technology used to sequence and orchestrate activity across sales and marketing. Instead, it’s the quality of a precisely researched and targeted audience. Of a truly tailored, personal experience.
This of course is a spectrum to play on – we can’t be all quality and no convenience. But I think we default too quickly to prioritizing the latter, and then wonder why the outcomes we seek aren’t materializing.
Just like good pizza takes time and ingredients to get right, we should consider the same in our marketing efforts.