Terms such as Customer Experience Management, One-To-One Marketing or - recently launched by Forrester Research - Adaptive Brand Marketing have received an increasing amount of attention in the marketing community. The rise of the internet and digital marketing has driven forward the notion that companies can adopt their messaging to better cater to the diversity of customers’ needs. And technology companies are thriving from this macro trend. Whether in the classic campaign management sector or in the online advertising sector, the ability to deliver messages targeted micro segments seems an attractive position for marketers to be in, and thus has allowed technology vendors to prosper.
Disguised as strategic initiatives, these technology vendors and early adopter marketers have been focusing on tactical schemes that look after certain bits of the marketing continuum.
I am a firm believer that the concept of Adaptive Brand Marketing – coordinating the brand experience across channels and over time – has the potential to revolutionise marketing for a wide range of companies. I also believe that it will be driven by (but not limited to) digital marketing. The key to succeeding is to lift it to a strategic level rather than the current tactical level, where the ‘personalisation’ initiatives currently reside.
So – how do we make CMOs embrace this instead of neglecting and outsourcing it to their online or CRM departments? I suggest (re)introducing a proven marketing concept and updating it to deliver on the challenge of Adaptive Brand Marketing.
The Persona Concept – in 2010
A thirty-seconds-history-lesson on personas: It was originally introduced by Angus Jenkinson in 1993/94 and made popular to the digital community by Alan Cooper in his acclaimed book “The Inmates are Running the Asylum”. Personas are fictional individuals created to reflect the core audience of a marketing campaign or a website build. By attaching ‘real-life’ personality attributes to fictional members of the audience, the agency creatives or the developers were able to relate their ideas more easily to the target audience. Will ‘Bill’ think this functionality is fun/useful/user friendly etc.? (thanks Wikipedia)
I propose developing a more extensive approach to the persona concept. One that is strategically founded and spans across the range of marketing disciplines. Personas are meant to include characteristics that contain a) demography, b) attitude and c) behavior. Most CMO target audience descriptions contain mainly quantitative description on demography (e.g. ‘our core customers are high net-worth individuals aged 35-55, living in suburban areas’ or ‘we need to target male students aged 18-25’), since they are more easily articulated to the rest of the C-level management team. Because it translates fairly easily into money.
But in order to embrace Adaptive Brand Marketing, we must move further and this is where I suggest the Strategic Marketing Personas as a concept for doing so.
Building on the three cornerstones – demography, attitude and behavior – defining Strategic Marketing Personas is not only possible but also practically achievable.
For instance, a mobile operator might define a Strategic Marketing Persona as “a high value male customer actively looking for a new mobile phone and who has a positive yet passive attitude towards our brand”. This Persona is strategic, because he represents someone of high value (demography) and a reasonable propensity to buy something specific (behavior) from the particular brand (attitude).
Now, with this persona defined as one of strategic value, the brand (in this case the mobile operator) can begin designing a strategy for how to engage with him. Should money be spent on TV advertising, on loyalty marketing initiatives or on online advertising? That is up for debate – but the point is that by defining these personas of strategic importance and using these as vehicles for prioritization, budget allocation and planning discussions, you get something much richer than your typical demographic segments or your tactical campaign audiences. With the marketing personas, you can define continuous engagement plans that shifts your way of thinking. And allows the CMO to facilitate this from a brand-wide perspective rather than leaving it to colleagues with tactical remits such as CRM or online advertising.
Same s…, new bottles?
Have we heard all of this before? Well, the notion of targeting your marketing messages to the individual is not exactly new or groundbreaking. And the idea of Strategic Marketing Personas is not so much a proposal for a new type of strategy. Rather, it is a methodology to deliver on the promises introduced by concepts like Adaptive Brand Marketing or One-to-One Marketing.
It would be great to hear how organizations are approaching this. So if you have experiences or anecdotal evidence of someone doing it the right way, share.
