Market to an audience of one: I’m not sure who coined the phrase, but we’ve been using it internally at SAP to convey our vision of how we want to help enable our marketing customers. It’s a simple phrase, just a few words, but to me, it has a wealth of meaning and power behind it.
‘Market to an audience of one’ has a wealth of meaning and power behind it.
To market to an audience of one is to be able to:
- Understand everything about each individual customer
- Deliver individualized, data-based experiences that are completely unique to that person
- Provide just what the customer needs, no more and no less
- Provide offers and information that the customer will be happy to receive, rather than annoying, irrelevant SPAM e-mails or pop-up ads that get the quick delete
Wow.
That would be nirvana to a marketer. (I just looked up the word “nirvana,” and the the literal meaning is “blown out.” Just to be clear, I’m not talking about blowing out candles, but the more informal usage of a place free of pain and worry, of the ultimate state of being.)
Achieving the state of nirvana in marketing
I don’t know of any companies that have really achieved this state of marketing. A lot of the great examples of marketing to an audience of one are really examples of outstanding customer service, such as the case of a Lego customer service representative who wrote a creative response to a 7-year-old boy in search of a replacement Ninjago mini figure. The trick is to be able to form an individual connection with each customer on a mass scale.
As Johnathan Becher once wrote, “I’m Listening: Engage an Audience of One,”: “Being the focus of someone’s attention is truly rare and powerful. It feels really good. That’s the same feeling you want your customers to have. You want them to feel that their needs are understood and fulfilled during every interaction with your company. Your customers must be an audience of one, where every part of your company is focused on their needs, their desires, and their successes.”
But that’s not easy to do. B2B vendors face a real challenge in trying to market to an audience of one since their buyers tend to purchase by committee. It’s difficult to personalize based on profile or purchase intent when a number of different individuals are doing the research and have different roles in the decision process. Even B2C vendors face similar challenges when they try to personalize. For example, my husband and I browse for and purchase very different items online. “Personalizing” an offer to me based on some kind of technical doohickey that my husband bought on our Amazon.com account won’t meet with much success.
Gathering and understanding the data about the customers is the first task. It’s also critical that that information is shared with all customer-facing teams and tools. Customers don’t want to be repeatedly asked to enter their account number, to explain their service issue again and again (hello, Comcast), or to be presented with irrelevant offers and content. The knowledge about the customer has to infuse their experiences at each interaction point: online store, brick-and-mortar store, customer service, and so forth.
Seven steps to marketing nirvana
There are a number of steps that need to be taken to achieve marketing nirvana. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be offering a series of blogs that will offer insights on how to move down the path. We hope you’ll “tune in” latest post in the series.
For now, I leave you with this:
