Tuesday, July 25, 2006

Mass Customization


I attended a seminar at my internship today on the concept of the "Return on Customer" . It was a lot of marketing speak, which I find fascinating, but probably would bore most creatives to tears. However, one example was brought up that piqued my interest.

The speaker, Martha Rogers , brought up a case study on Tesco (basically a UK version of Wal-mart). Apparently, Tesco manages a database of over 11 million customers and sends out 5 million versions of their quarterly newsletter. That means no more than 3 people receive the same newsletter. Dog owners get a newsletter with dog food coupons, families with children receive discounts off diapers, etc.

Now obviously, there were not 5 million different strategies and creative executions. However, as the industry trends towards mass customization, I'm wondering when the day will come that creatives are handed the task of generating dozens of entirely different ads to target different groups. We already do it for various ethnic groups, but what if we drilled down deeper and started segmenting our creative based on geography, purchasing behavior, etc. Will the creative suffer or will it only get better? Can you imagine being handed a creative brief that asks you to target Petco customers who own a hamster and visited the store X number of times in the past month? Media placement can already be achieved at that level: is it only a matter of time before creative catches up?

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

I already know of a creative who is mass customizing direct mail postcards to homeowners for gardening services. For each address, a database has been predefined knowing the approximate yard size based on a mailing address and creates an estimated price quotation based on yard size that is printed on each individually addressed direct mail post card. The piece is a 4-color post card. The personalized information is populated on the piece at the time of printing. The company doing it is RenoType in Reno, NV, on industry standard printing equipment. I saw this during the Spring of 2006.

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