Individualisation is the future of marketing. I write this just after the holiday season when I have been eating too much, and not long after looking up a gym membership.

My inbox is now awash with pop-up ads sprouting weight-loss remedies. This is what I would call personalisation sending an email to a group of people (those who look for gym memberships for example) targeting similar products that might be of interest. Unfortunately, we are all becoming immune to this type of targeting.

The future of marketing, therefore, should be more about targeting on a more individual level. In the online age, many marketers seem to have forgotten about the consumer experience offline and this is what we need to focus on more in the future.

Big data is wonderful because it can tell us so much about our customers, but it is what we do with that data once we have it and how we use our creativity to bring it to life in the real world that will shape the future success of our marketing efforts.

For example, we might know that a certain guest likes a memory foam pillow, drinks espressos with soy milk, regularly orders a club sandwich and a red wine for dinner and always has a crime novel by their bedside. We could greet them with a soy milk espresso or send up a bottle of red wine to their room. This would be what you might call personalisation.

But what about if we went the next step and sent them a hand-written list of nearby wineries or the latest crime novel thats just been released. If we wanted to take it one step further, we could ask them to meet the executive chef to design their own club sandwich and add it to the menu or have their name sewn onto a memory pillow to take home with them. This is individualisation and is the perfect way to use our marketing skills to create magic for our guests.

We must all adapt our approach to individualisation. This is what todays demanding consumer expects. Millennials, especially, want to feel that you understand them and are speaking to them personally. They have a highly developed sense of self and want you to see them as an individual.

We must remember the average person receives over 5000 communication messages per day. It is increasingly difficult, then, to reach todays consumer so it is vital that you are targeting your messages to the individual and not just to a blanket group of like-minded people.

Technology allows us to drive more meaningful marketing, but it is how we use the data to target the individual that will make our marketing efforts stand out.

At AccorHotels, we use Local Measure to gain insights into their preferences and predict their future patterns. Local Measure uses local content, social media and mobile technology to provide live data to operationalise service at a local level.

This is the height of individualisation, because we can quickly learn that a certain guest is celebrating a birthday, for example, and then surprise them with a cake or gift. We can see if they are having issues with their rooms and immediately send someone to rectify them and we can start to understand the kind of activities they enjoy during their stay to individually suggest new services to them.

Again, it comes down to bringing the online data into an offline experience that is individually targeted. We also recently invested in John Paul, a concierge and CRM business, to better target our guests through individualisation.

Todays consumer demands you speak to them directly. For myself, if those companies sending me pop-up ads suggesting diets had targeted me individually, they would know I would be more interested in a triathlon in an inspiring destination than in a weight-loss solution and perhaps they would stop making me feel like I am fat! This is where individualisation will always win.

The author of the article is Michael Parsons, vice president of marketing and strategic relationships, Asia Pacific, AccorHotels.

See the original post here:

The Futurist: Individualisation is the future of marketing - Marketing Interactive