Personalization: Coming Full Circle, Part 1
By Arthur O'Connor
We've come a long way in personalization. So far, in fact, that in many ways the industry is right back to where it started.
Once a carefully defined (as well as manually intensive and very expensive) niche strategy, personalization has recently become a grab bag of uncoordinated, incompatible, and overlapping tactics aimed at general consumers.
Lured by the bold promises of one-to-one marketing and "mass customization," many businesses embraced personalization without a strategic framework for investment and without understanding either the value of customers over time or the value of the Web as a channel to influence their behavior.
In many cases (as with so many doomed customer relationship management, or CRM, implementations), companies have undertaken personalization initiatives without even a management commitment to customer supremacy, organizational incentives, or infrastructure.
After so many failed -- or at least disappointing -- experiments with click-stream analytics, rules-based personalization, and data mining solutions, businesses are realizing that the complexities of individual customers aren't readily captured and gleaned from Web servers logs or huge data warehouses -- no matter how fancy or expensive the analytics.
Given the tremendous investment required to get a meaningful look at customers, businesses are now focusing on the concept of "service to value." In essence, they are ret
By Arthur O'Connor
We've come a long way in personalization. So far, in fact, that in many ways the industry is right back to where it started.
Once a carefully defined (as well as manually intensive and very expensive) niche strategy, personalization has recently become a grab bag of uncoordinated, incompatible, and overlapping tactics aimed at general consumers.
Lured by the bold promises of one-to-one marketing and "mass customization," many businesses embraced personalization without a strategic framework for investment and without understanding either the value of customers over time or the value of the Web as a channel to influence their behavior.
In many cases (as with so many doomed customer relationship management, or CRM, implementations), companies have undertaken personalization initiatives without even a management commitment to customer supremacy, organizational incentives, or infrastructure.
After so many failed -- or at least disappointing -- experiments with click-stream analytics, rules-based personalization, and data mining solutions, businesses are realizing that the complexities of individual customers aren't readily captured and gleaned from Web servers logs or huge data warehouses -- no matter how fancy or expensive the analytics.
Given the tremendous investment required to get a meaningful look at customers, businesses are now focusing on the concept of "service to value." In essence, they are ret
posted by Dennis at
3:14 PM
