Once you know to look for it, it’s everywhere. Personalized TV recommendations. Personalized skincare. Personalized style boxes from clothing retailers. Corporations have more data on us than ever before, and like it or not, they’re going to use it.
When it comes to things like monogrammed bath towels and mugs with your name + “World’s Best Dad” on them, personalization has been around for quite a while. But as a corporate buzzword, I started hearing about personalization around 2019 or so. The company I worked for had done some market research and decided that personalization was the future of marketing, and even though they’d already developed a similar product in the past and it had failed, we were going all in on personalization.
So what do I actually mean by “personalization,” anyway? The best explanation I’ve ever come across is from this 2004 article on why there’s really only one kind of ketchup (i.e. why ketchup flavors aren’t personalized) but there are so many different types of pasta sauce. Until the 1980s, brands like Prego and Ragú were “striving for the platonic spaghetti sauce,” the one sauce to rule them all.
But that’s not actually how human taste works:
Instead, working with the Campbell’s kitchens, [food scientist Howard Moskowitz] came up with forty-five varieties of spaghetti sauce. These were designed to differ in every conceivable way: spiciness, sweetness, tartness, saltiness, thickness, aroma, mouth feel, cost of ingredients, and so forth. He had a trained panel of food tasters analyze each of those varieties in depth. Then he took the prototypes on the road—to New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Jacksonville—and asked people in groups of twenty-five to eat between eight and ten small bowls of different spaghetti sauces over two hours and rate them on a scale of one to a hundred. When Moskowitz charted the results, he saw that everyone had a slightly different definition of what a perfect spaghetti sauce tasted like. If you sifted carefully through the data, though, you could find patterns, and Moskowitz learned that most people’s preferences fell into one of three broad groups: plain, spicy, and extra-chunky, and of those three the last was the most important. Why? Because at the time there was no extra-chunky spaghetti sauce in the supermarket. Over the next decade, that new category proved to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars to Prego. “We all said, ‘Wow!’ ” Monica Wood, who was then the head of market research for Campbell’s, recalls. “Here there was this third segment—people who liked their spaghetti sauce with lots of stuff in it—and it was completely untapped. So in about 1989-90 we launched Prego extra-chunky. It was extraordinarily successful.”
The reason why literal taste works this way is pretty fascinating—we actually all have a different selection of taste buds, so we do in fact taste foods differently. (As in, the people who think cilantro tastes like soap aren’t making it up.)
But it’s true of metaphorical taste as well. We have different tastes in clothing, movies, and music. We respond best to different forms of motivation (some people need a gym buddy to exercise; others need to see themselves being able to lift more weight each time they go as motivation). Sure, we’re influenced by trends and Wirecutter recommendations, but we’re all our own unique snowflakes and, at least in Western culture, we tend to like it that way.
Whether we like it when a brand gets to know us is another story. It’s great when Spotify or Netflix seems to really get you, sure, but have you ever heard someone claim their phone was listening to them because they said something out loud and then instantly started getting Instagram ads for it?
For the record, no, your phone is not listening to you beyond waiting for you to say “Hey Siri.” But it does know a whole lot about you, from your search and purchase histories to your social media profiles, the wifi network you’re on and who’s on it with you, which can often make you feel like it must be eavesdropping on you.
Back at that marketing agency I worked for, at the same time we were trying to convince Fortune 500 companies that they needed to personalize their marketing efforts, one of my clients had their own personalized product they were eager to promote: personalized investing advice as part of a do-it-yourself investing service. So we tested it, and personalization kept losing. This bank’s customers were firmly not interested in personalized financial advice.
This is when I started to develop the Natalie Sacks Theory of Personalization Marketing (patent pending):
Personalization is a “how,” not a “why.”
As a consumer, I do not care if the product I receive is different from the product other people receive. I don’t care if it’s the same financial advice, the same medical treatment, or the same insurance plan (all things I’ve been asked to promote in my career).
What I care about is if those things are right for me. Now, as it turns out, in order to get the right version of those things for me, they do need to be personalized to a certain degree. In the medical world (my current marketing gig), for instance, different people do respond better to different allergy or migraine or hypertension medications, which is part of why there are so many kinds of each.
But I don’t want a personalized treatment plan. I want drugs that work (for me). And that’s the difference between a “how” and a “why.”
Does personalizing your marketing language work as well as personalizing the products themselves, by the way? In my experience, it was all a bit of a wash. Because as much as some people respond better to being guilted into doing something and others respond better to flattery, often there’s one message that works best on everybody anyway.
We found that, among Americans at least, really all anyone wanted was to feel like they won something, or that they were getting a good deal, or better yet that they won that good deal. People are really profoundly selfish as consumers, to the extent that it’s actually quite hard to find good messaging about buying things for other people because users are still really only thinking about themselves.
I’ll get more into this next week, when we chat about dumb email marketing tricks (that actually work). Stay tuned!
One final thought: In the marketing world, we often also use the word “personalization” to refer to variables that fill in with information about you, like your name or your car model, say. Including that information in emails and web portals does improve response rates a little, but it’s not a huge boost.
Rover, the dog-walking service, does fantastic and bordering-on-absurd dog name personalization in their email subject lines—especially if you accidentally put in your own name instead of your dog’s. If you want to receive regular personalized emails asking about your intelligence, behavior and bowel movements, I highly recommend it.
So, do you like it when brands offer you personalization? How about when they just seem to get you? Do those two experiences feel different to you, and why?