The entire business cycle heavily depends upon branding, marketing, selling, and customer servicing. Whether you have a good product or an excellent service, until your brand has generated a certain value you will continue to find it challenging to grow your business. I often see advertisements by Rajeev Talreja, who begins his pitch with, “Are you a business owner who is feels your team might learn from you and leave you?” Read more to find out more about personalisation, and how the introduction to this blog connects with its title!
Key Takeaways
- What is Personalisation?
- Examples of Personalisation
- Striking the balance in Personalisation
- Data as a route to make decisions on personalisation
What is Personalisation?
To personalise means to design or produce something to meet someone’s individual requirements. Such requirements could be of a personal brand, a SME / MSME company, or any other legal entity in business.
Examples of Personalisation:
If you are in India and you use Spotify, then you must have seen the pricing plan of Rs. 7/day and Rs. 24/week. If you haven’t then go to Spotify and have a look.
I wonder why such a low pricing; perhaps because Spotify wants you to have a paid trial in the lowest cost possible. Rs. 24 for a week is less a bhel eaten once! I find this a personalised way to tell a user to try out a product. What have you got to loose by spending Rs. 24 online? Nothing.
Absolutely nothing. In July 2022, Spotify had 433 million active users – Imagine 1/10th of this user base purchasing the Rs. 24/- subscription for a week!
The point here is not about how much money Spotify will make, but about how easily Spotify can onboard paid transactors due to personalising the pricing.
Personal is the new Premium. Isn’t it?
Personalisation at every step of a business – product designing, branding, marketing, selling and after service would perhaps lead to a very personalised connection with the brand.
While pricing is being currently personalised (the growth of subscription services!) by several brands, many others have focused on personalising the communications.
If you check the Airtel App, you’ll notice that the app allows you to configure reminders and also makes your bill payments easier via the Airtel UPI.
On one hand Facebook and Ola have automatised their complaint messaging which has certainly caused a agitation to many, but on the other hand I like how Swiggy has managed to combine bots with real people who cater to your ‘wrong orders’.
Striking the balance:
How much to Personalise will always remain a question for 2 reasons:
1. Do you have the resources to invest, maintain and manage these personalisations?
2. If automated responses are given a personalised feel, then at what point will they become repetitive and redundant?
At BrewAndBuzz Global, we advise our clients to have a real voice, but we make sure they don’t desperately sound real. There is a difference between writing on behalf someone as writing ‘as’ someone. The difference lies in the intent and intonation.
Your brand will generate a significant value in the minds of your clients if your communication is personalised. As Prashant Kumar writes, “No wonder some thinkers have gone so far as to say that Personalisation could be a whole new P of marketing (apart from the 4 Ps of Product, Price, Place and Promotion.) Personal is the new premium, and if deployed well, brands have an unprecedented opportunity to command it.
In today’s increasingly competitive marketplace, delivering customised experiences is no longer a “good to have this service” — it’s a regular expectation. Personalisation surely drives engagement and thereby sales.
Do you remember generic emails from banks? These emails from banks read something like, “You are now eligible for Rs. 80,000 OD..” in the title. Off late, the email titles are way more personalised, like they start with the name of the receiver, for instance, “Mr Parth, you are now eligible for Rs. 80,000 OD..”.
Even in other walks of life, try recalling how a postcard in the late 90s had branding all over it with a bold lettered name of the receiver; Cut to modern times – your email has an intuitive design, your name, and even the pictures are personalised. Don’t you feel more connected with the images and their captions? Some emails are very intriguing while others maintain a very formal tone.
Data helps you decide on Personalisation:
In May 2022, we got an enquiry from the founder of Mentami. (The site is just launched, so do have a look: Mentami).
Working for the founder, we realised that a lot of business owners tend to personalise an experience for their prospective customer but based on their subjective experience. (Of course AB Testing comes to the rescue in such situations!) But, we thought of taking the objective route and did a survey. We conducted a survey, in which random passers by voluntarily participated in reviewing Mentami’s website. Based on the collected data we made a few changes. Now the internal and external visitors of Mentami feel a personalised connection with Mentami.
Get a Video Pitch personalised for your marketing needs!
The point here is not whether the business is making money or not, but whether the decision to personalisation was made through consideration of data (objectivity) or personal experience (subjectivity).
This brings us to the final point of discussion in this blog – the decision to personalise should be based upon data collected or on a subjective perspective?
Of course. It must be on data! Data leads us to making objective decisions and we can quantify our progress.
Ponder over this blog, and a leave a comment on what you think.
One Response
Thanks so much!