Keeping Our Promises
It’s that time of year again — time for New Year’s resolutions. In our personal lives we make them but only occasionally keep them, which is cause for regret but little more. In our businesses, however, it’s different. There are consequences for breaking our promises to consumers, particularly today. Consumers won’t forgive us as readily as we forgive ourselves, especially about promises they’ve heard before. Like personalization.
Personalization is the great broken promise of direct marketing. We’ve made this pledge many times with a hodgepodge of rhetorical flourishes ranging from customization to customer-centricity to one-to-one, yet we always come up short. We barter for permission to access consumers’ personal information and promise a personalized shopping experience in return. Yet only a handful of us actually keep that promise, leaving millions of consumers unhappy, unfulfilled and unwilling to forgive and forget.
No surprise, then, that privacy has become a major issue for our industry. We accumulate personal information without holding up our end of the bargain. Consumers have no trouble drawing the obvious conclusion that we want their personal information only for our benefit, and not for theirs. It’s not only a one-way exchange, it’s a broken promise. And that makes consumers mad.
We find ourselves scrambling to prove the worth and value of what we do because it’s less and less obvious in what we deliver. Lawmakers use direct marketing as political fodder. A lot of sound and fury for sure, but that doesn’t make the threat any less serious. Response rates continue to decline as more consumers resist direct marketing in any number of ways. The costs to overcome this resistance are staggering and climbing. Consumers feel threatened and exploited by our grandiose promises of personalization that beguile them into acquiescing to our demands, only to be disappointed yet again in the end.
This year we must make a different kind of resolution. Even though many consumers are keeping direct marketers at arm’s length, they don’t want to abandon direct marketing. They just want better direct marketing. Notwithstanding some deep-seated misgivings, many consumers remain willing to share personal information in exchange for personalized direct marketing.
A recent study conducted by DIRECT and Yankelovich Inc. (“Consumer Outlook,” DIRECT, August 2002) found that 43 percent of those who made a purchase through a direct channel in the last six months agreed they’d be “willing to provide personalized information to marketers in exchange for a customized shopping experience.”
Note the quid pro quo here. Many consumers are willing to share personal information if (and lately, only if) direct marketers provide them with personalization in return. Certainly, this is not the majority of consumers but it is a substantial minority — and successes with these consumers would undoubtedly win over many of those who are opposed to striking this bargain today.
Privacy issues are easy to misunderstand. Privacy is not black and white; instead, it is entirely negotiable. For the right price (and assuming the right security), consumers will share almost anything we want or need to know.
Just look at daytime talk shows. For a mere 15 minutes of syndicated fame, people will confess to the most outrageous things because the value exchange seems fair to them. Privacy gets contentious when we accumulate information without consumers knowing about it and when we fail to offer anything of sufficient value in return. This is when consumers feel abused, and increasingly this is how direct marketing consumers feel.
Our failure to deliver on the promise of personalization has worsened perceptions that there is a dearth of value in what we offer in exchange for consumers’ personal information.
Too often, the personal information we collect is used for direct marketing that is nothing more than addressable mass marketing. Consumers are waiting for us to deliver on the broken promise of personalization. This year, we should resolve to start fulfilling that promise. Because we are certainly not going to stop collecting personal information. It’s the heart and soul of what we do. So we must catch up with what we owe consumers.
Technology-based direct marketing (like Web sites and e-mail) is perhaps the most obvious way of personalizing shopping experiences. Indeed, technology is now available to use personal information in ways that will be seen as meaningful and genuine personalization, not just a mindless search-and-replace of names in a list.
But effective personalization does not require a huge investment in technology, a massive CRM solution or the latest digital printing system. Personalization can be as simple as sending two versions of a direct mail piece, each customized to different segments. Or it can be as painless as small tweaks in a call center script that utilize a few relevant data points. Poor technology is a convenient excuse, but it’s a cop-out and one that exacerbates fundamental problems in our industry.
It’s time to start keeping our promises. Consumers are anxious for us to personalize our marketing and their shopping experiences. As long as we are willing to do what it takes, so are they.
J. WALKERS SMITH is president of Yankelovich inc., Atlanta
CRAIG WOOD is president of Yankelovich’s Monitor MindBase division in Chapel Hill, NC.
