Data-hungry marketing ignores the magic of human experience

Our data and technology systems should enable individual experiences that are as changeable as people, adjusting a brand’s behaviour to evolve at the speed of life.

Dr Paul Blockey, managing director at precision marketing agency, RAPP

Australian businesses continue to invest billions in marketing technologies and data capture efforts. But most are now drowning in data, and failing to make the most of those investments.

Precision marketing should be exactly that: precise. Focused on the individual. An antidote to one-size-fits-all approaches. The richer and more meaningful our data, the more we should be treating consumers as unique people – complex, emotional, illogical people – and align brand hopes with individuals’ dreams. We should defend and deepen the magic of human experience.

Instead, our individuality is getting ground up by data-hungry marketing that isn’t optimising for real human outcomes.

We’re leaving people out, limiting our brands’ potentials, and leaving money on the table.

It’s easy to forget that on the end of the algorithms that drive our economic engines live millions of real people. The business leaders behind the wheel are only human too, dealing with everything, everywhere, all at once: pressure to deliver a return on investment, economic headwinds, advancing AI, overdue attention on inclusion, environmental impacts, an increasingly thin line between politics and profit. These pressures cannot be alleviated, though, simply by revving our technology and data machines. We need to be finetuning to our humanity.

Usually, we task platform specialists with getting the most out of our technology investments.

They’re best-placed to fast-track returns, right? The issue is that often, these consultants see the world through their tool of choice, and try to code people to behave to these conventions. They are more shaped by this tech than the consumers they hope to influence.

People are segmented into groups that flatten the uniqueness of their lives and the complexity of their category behaviour. They are pushed through a series of clumsy touchpoints that mince human differences into average results. Bigger business opportunities go unrecognised. The chance to create elevated brand experiences and emotive customer journeys that make the most of our technology investments is lost.

The rush on data is compounded by privacy changes and the death of the third-party cookie. Rightly, we prioritise gathering first party data. But more often we do this with little emotional intelligence. We treat people as sources of data, ingesting as much as we can, believing the more data we have, the wiser our collective brain will grow.

Have we assembled perfect simulations of our consumers in our databases? When it comes to the data we choose to capture, the analytics we perform, the insights yielded, and how most brands activate their data, the results remain uncomfortably pedestrian. A glance at the most recent measurement PowerPoint or a look behind that dashboard will no doubt confirm it. We nudge homogenous groups in small increments towards aggregated outcomes.

We generally don’t see data as the living and breathing contours of the market we serve, let alone realise the business potential locked up in our individuality. We don’t design for individual diversity. People who fall outside of the narrow confines of our targeting, segmentation and decisioning don’t get their needs met. We restrain our brands’ potential. We leave money on the table.

A brand’s precision marketing efforts must be founded on an appreciation of our individuality and the differences that infuse the category. If not, everything that follows limits choices and possibilities for both consumers and brands. We will only ever come to know and serve stereotypes, not real people.

It’s impossible to capture the vastness of what it is to be human in data. Even our own DNA belies our experiences. But this does not mean we cannot craft empathetic journeys with brands that sense and adapt to unique individual needs and life circumstances.

It is possible to approach technology agnostically – with a creative mix of insight and imagination – so that we become more than the “tools of our tools”.

We can balance maximising existing infrastructure while building towards a technology vision that keeps individual human emotions and behaviours at the heart of the brand’s ecosystem. We can prioritise using data to heighten the emotional intelligence of our marketing and restore the shine to customer experience.

We can expect more from marketing science teams, who in turn can place more human demands on their data. Modelling suites should be able to recognise and respond to the multifaceted nature of human identities, flexing to diverse passions, preferences, values, past histories, future tendencies, contextual influences, channels, and category behaviours.

Some might call this a laundry list for future state, but this defence of the status quo dismisses what can be achieved by starting today. Using the best of our systems to create more human value deepens ties to brands and unleashes business potential.

Our data and technology systems should enable individual experiences that are as changeable as people, adjusting a brand’s behaviour to evolve at the speed of life. I’m not saying it’s easy – it takes a heightened level of consumer-centricity and a new breed of data-driven marketers to keep people at the heart of what we do – but none of this is pie in the sky.

It’s all entirely achievable when you ensure your precision marketing approaches stand up for individuality. Don’t let maladroit use of machines and math kill the magic.

Dr Paul Blockey is managing director at RAPP.