Behavioural Marketing
Contents |
Introduction
Customer-centric marketing – true customer-centric marketing is, even in a digital age, incredibly difficult. Fortunately the web allows us to use behavioural marketing.
In this industry we still talk a lot about segmentation and understanding customers’ needs. The argument is we can group customers into like minded groups and infer likely behaviour from their profiles.
But many marketers are asking “Why bother?” It is a lot easier to observe what customers actually do, and offer them something on a 'people like you' basis.
Amazon
Take online retailer Amazon, a master of behavioural marketing. Amazon does not know much about its customers as people (and why should it care?).
But Amazon knows a great deal about what every single one of its customers buys – both from past purchases and what customers put on their wish list. As a result the retailer doesn't care if two book buyers have different profiles - what does interest it is that those two people buy the same books. Admittedly they could get a bit smarter merging profiles and behavioural data but it sounds like a lot of work for very little return. Predicting book reading interests from personal data is just too much like guess work, you will get many more misses than hits.
Behavioural Clues
Behavioural marketing is easier to apply in e-commerce environments, retail and service - the likes of Amazon, BA Frequent Flyer clubs. But the behavioural approach is applicable across the board. What this means is that the role of the marketer is to do stuff, give stuff away, offer help, services, content - whatever allows the customer to do, interact or engage. The marketer is searching for Behavioural clues. Consequently our job is to do something interesting to the customer rather than something that looks to sell with indecent haste. In high end business technology the things that work best are the offers of free IT reviews, on and off line. The information you get is all you need to know about a customer’s requirements and willingness to purchase.
Quality not Quantity
The problem with the behavioural marketing approach is that as marketers we have to think about the quality of prospects and customers rather than the numbers we reach. For some this is a major cultural shift, for others it is an easier transition. Behavioural marketing is more than behavioural targeting; it is effectively the fusion of digital and direct marketing. It is giving us 121 marketing but without the complexity of profiling and inferring behaviour from attitude, profile, demographics, firmographics or whatever. So what will make it really interesting is when (complimentary) businesses sharing their behavioural data become common place.
One day soon, ‘what do my customers look like?’ may become an irrelevant question. We just won't care.