I recently was scrolling Instagram when an ad for a health supplement popped on my feed. As a health conscious individual, I regularly see health-focused ads, but this one was different. This one featured a character with my name. The ad was the story told in four parts across four squares like a comic book featuring a brown-haired male protagonist named Tyler. Whether this was intentional marketing practice used by the brand was not clear. But what was clear to me is that it freaked me out. My immediate reaction was it was an intentional marketing tactic, essentially following me around on the internet yelling about the product in my face. Needless to say, I did not purchase from them.
I saw a statistic that stated 46% of people surveyed believe personalization does not work on them with a portion of those people calling personalization “creepy”. As digital advertising continues to evolve with the use of generative AI and advanced modeling, “creepy” experiences will continue to proliferate. Ads will exist in-app of our favorite services like Uber and UPS. Digital billboards will present ads personalized for each person that walks by. Online shopping experiences will be tailored for us both from an experience and offering standpoint. This we know is true. What we don’t know is whether it will actually work. This is especially unclear when we think about personalization at mass scale. If everyone is personalizing, then it’s essentially table stakes marketing right? At what point do we all just become desensitized to its perceived or unperceived impact, both positive or negative. Even now, my own experience with creepy personalization didn’t shock me; it just perturbed me. As we are exposed to more and more personalization, I believe our reactions will continue to become more and more rational and ultimately we will be more and more unphased. Thus personalization in the digital world is a short term solution to drive sales, which then presents the question of what companies are supposed to do in order to sell in the long term. The opposite of digital personalization, or performance based marketing and sales, is brand marketing. Brand marketing focuses more on creative and storytelling. It uses the company vision and mission as part of its marketing. And most notably, it sells to the audience’s future self. The most reputable brands in the world are typically brand focused more than performance performance, such as Tesla and Apple. With such brands, the perception (or illusion depending on how you think about marketing) is that the brands, the companies and their underlying people are obsessed with making good products and good experiences for the end customer. The perception is that the company cares so much about the product and the mission that they don’t even have time to put into deceptive or persuasive marketing tactics. And these companies with their brand focused marketing create a sense of exclusivity, as if there’s something I’m missing by not being a part of the brand, its mission and its journey. All of this supports the individual’s future self. Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman famously discovered in one of his many studies on human decision making that emotions drive 90% of the decision making process in our mind. My assessment is that emotions play an even larger role in larger decisions, those decisions that impact ourselves, our careers, our personal brands, our personal finances, and those around us that we care about. That is, things that impact who we will become, as opposed to things that impact who we are right now. For example, a new car is a far more emotional purchase than what we will have for lunch that day, and any good luxury car salesperson knows that they sell to the future self rather than the needs of the individual in that moment. Furthermore, we are emotionally attached to our previous beliefs and decisions, especially when they are highly emotional. So if I buy a nice luxury car because I had this vision of my future self driving it down the Pacific Coast Highway with my girlfriend in the front seat, that vision will hardcode my brain into believing that it was the proper decision no matter how much money I spend on it or no matter how the decision ends up. In a B2B context, the idea is the same. Visions and stories shared with clients should sell the idea of your product or services to the future selves of the client in the context of their gain from choosing you. For the ground level executors, you are selling a new set of experiences to put on their résumé. For the mid-level manager, you are selling an opportunity to show your capabilities to the executive level and improve your career trajectory. For executive leaders, you are selling an opportunity to appease your CEO and to drive the value for your customers that you set out to. The opposite of gain is loss, and you can position loss against the audience’s future selves but gain is more impactful and frankly more fun to sell than the classic “what happens if you do nothing” approach to stoking fear of loss into your client. At an organizational level, you must choose whether you are brand or performance marketing based. You practice both and have tactics for both, but there must be a primary marketing strategy employed. And more and more, I’m finding that brand focused companies are in a better position to win in the long term. Performance-based marketing strategies are under constant attack from internal and external forces such as new entrants into the market, changes to company strategy, changes in underlying marketing and sales technology, and changes to underlying marketing and sales operators. In the short-term, there is visibility into performance and thus success because we can track paid media to leads to conversion to sales to average order value to retention to upsell. Along that journey, we can purchase software or change processes to improve a stage in the funnel, slowly tinkering away endlessly in the pursuit of extracting more profit from customers. The tactics deployed are exploitative of human nature, borderline deceptive, and what a portion of the population deems “creepy”. Instead, tap into the emotional side of decision making by telling your story as an individual and as an organization. Be proud of what you have done and what you will do. Speak confidently about your product and services as if no other product or service exists. Use stories with specific characters and emotions. Use the organization's brand to build long lasting connections with audiences.