The next level in personalisation
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This document discusses the importance of personalization and understanding audiences on a deeper level. It argues that traditional segmentation methods are not enough and personalization should go beyond demographics. Effective personalization requires understanding motivations, needs, values, attitudes and behaviors of audiences through qualitative research. It also stresses that companies should view their offerings from the perspective of the audience and understand how the offerings fit into audiences' lives. Taxonomies need to be as deep as the understanding of audiences and content should supplement discussions important to audiences.
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The next level in personalisation
- 1. The next level in personalisation 8 July 2015
- 2. A little about us Reading Room is a global digital communications consultancy, founded in 1997, independent and owner-operated with over 220 staff passionate about digital in 7 offices serving 4 continents, Follow us! @ReadingRoom www.readingroom.com
- 3. Dr. Deborah Ko Behavioural Psychologist Deborah Ko received her PhD in psychology with a specialization in the cultural psychology and the psychology of Internet behavior. She currently is a psychology consultant looking at the psychological influences in digital, such as its impact in design, user experience, and content creation. Her goals are to encourage behavioral change through digital strategy and implementation. Deborah.Ko@readingroom.com.sg //@kesatuuli
- 4. We have short attention spans. We don’t like wasting time sifting through useless information. We hate making lots of decisions.
- 5. Personalisation helps us Make fewer decisions Help us find what we’re looking for Improve customer experience Waste less time
- 6. Would she buy this?
- 7. 1. How old is she? 2. What’s her occupation? 3. Budget? 4. What features? 5. What are her interests? 6. Frustrations about her skin? 7. What makes her think about skincare? 8. Feelings about youth/aging? 9. What does her appearance say about her?
- 8. 1. Demographic 2. Role based 3. Socioeconomic 4. Functional needs 5. Interests 6. Barriers 7. Triggers 8. Emotions/Attitudes 9. Self-expression
- 9. SEGMENTATION IS GREAT. But we’re doing it wrong.
- 10. UK mothers find marketing messages overly idealistic and unachievable 46% UK mums find messages sexist. 28% UK mums actually identify with advertisements’ portrayal of mothers. 19% UK mothers believe that marketing messages view motherhood “as an activity” not a bond between mother and child 58%
- 11. South East Asian mums increase their Internet usage above other media sources once they become mothers 80% South East Asian mums prefer internet resources for parenting advice over traditional means 74% Many Chinese women do not relate to the supermom stereotype, instead demanding a perspective of motherhood “that solves real-life problems”
- 12. How we typically segment Stay at home With young children Work part-time With teenagers Career driven With young adults With infants
- 13. Rethinking segmentation Work Part-time Stay at home With infants Career driven With young children With young adults With teenagers Fashion | Health | Nature | DIY | Art Food | Decor/Design | Techie | Travel Fear | Safety | Growth | Joy | Fatigue Gatekeeper | Mentor | Role model
- 15. On today’s menu: 1. Know your audience better 2. Understand your offering from your audience’s perspective
- 16. Know your audience better
- 17. Make your research smarter Business as usual… Focus groups to get opinions from your audience Asking people what they want Asking them only about how they feel about your product/service Asking if they would participate or like hypothetical situations/campai gns Asking them advice on what would make things better BAD FORM.
- 18. What this research will tell you USER’S JOB
- 19. What causes them to think about things related to your industry? What intrigues them? What’s worth sharing and why? What scares them? What keeps them up at night? How does your product fit into their lifestyle? What problems do they have? What gives them a sense of pride? Make your research smarter Ask lifestyle questions:
- 20. YOUR JOB What this research will tell you
- 21. Psychographic personas Personas that outline: MotivationsNeeds Values Attitudes/Emotions Barriers/Fears Behaviours that occur because of the above
- 22. Although born in Australia, he moved his wife Sophia, an engineer, and his son Andrew (age 3) to Singapore to be closer to his parents who live in Jurong East. He is an established brand designer, working at Ogilvy and enjoys working on elevating local brands. Although he lives frugally, he likes to spend on quality products and experiences. He recently spent a weekend researching information on a new guitar since his band plays monthly at Full Pint Brewery along the East Coast park. When he travels he likes to immerse himself in the culture. Although his backpacking days are over, he still enjoys taking the road less travelled, trying new foods, and picking up meaningful souvenirs from his travels. Dissecting the average persona Travel Persona David Lim, 34 years old
- 23. What is a psychographic persona? Motivation/Driv e Trigger Hurdles
- 24. Joking or banter on forums and private messages Meeting new friends that share your similar values or experiences Deep friendships and offline connections. Emotional healing from traumatic events and lifelines. Less emotional connection High emotional connection The Blood Brothers (and Sisters) Veterans that are looking for community and the ability to connect on an emotional level with someone that understands them. It can be to pass the time and have fun or be a lifesaver in darker times. The forums, private messages, and chat features are most important to them.
- 25. Behaviours Attitudes/EmotionsMotivations The Blood Brothers (and Sisters) Mobile needs?
- 26. The Networkers Veterans that are connecting to build a social network of people they know. They use the site to find past acquaintances and friends. The search functions are the most important to them. Career Personal From my unit From my friends From my training camp From my military branch
- 28. A deeper consumer journey
- 29. Emotional appeal Self motivation Functional & Informational knowledge Content and the consumer mind How useful is the solution? How difficult is it for me to carry out the solution? Do I have the necessary mental and physical capacity to carry out the solution? How does the problem affect me emotionally? How would I feel if the problem was solved? How assured and supported do I feel in my decision? What is the person I want to be? Who do I want to be perceived as? What are my values and attitudes?
- 30. Would she buy this?
- 31. Friends/Famil yCelebritiesAdvertisers Billboards TV Magazine/ Newspaper Radio Blogs Social Media Social Media PPC Instagram Instagram Web press Pinterest Push notificatio n eDM Offline Online 1. Am I missing something? Info Emo Self Problem | Solution | Research | Decision | Purchase | Validation Emotions: Dissatisfaction, fear, frustration
- 32. Offline Online Problem | Solution | Research | Decision | Purchase | Validation Emotions: Hope, anticipation, skepticism, curiosity Friends/Famil y Celebrities Experts TV Magazine/N ewspaper Blogs Social Media Forums Web article 2. Do I know how to fix it? Am I capable? Info Emo Self
- 33. Offline Online Problem | Solution | Research | Decision | Purchase | Validation Emotions: Uncertainty, curiosity, fear of regret 3. I think I know what I need. What is the best to meet my needs? Friends/Famil y Celebrities Experts Blogs Social Media Forums Web report Sales person SMS/ call Magazine/N ewspaper In-store comparison Online product comparison/ reviews Online videos Blogs Web- site Info Emo Self
- 34. Offline Online Problem | Solution | Research | Decision | Purchase | Validation Emotions: Hope, anticipation, reassurance, fear, worry 4. I have enough information and confidence to make a decision SELF Effective Within budget Social needs met Utility needs met Product is self expressive Quality needs met Info Emo Self
- 35. Offline Online Problem | Solution | Research | Decision | Purchase | Validation Emotions: Excitement, frustration, impatience 5. How easy/convenient is it for me to make the purchase? Customer service Fast delivery options Ease of checkout Secure Sales person Online product comparison/ reviews Availability Info Emo Self
- 36. Offline Online Problem | Solution | Research | Decision | Purchase | Validation Emotions: Satisfaction, delight, regret, frustration, anger, disappointment 6. Did my choice help solve my problem? Friends/Famil y Celebrities ExpertsBlogs Social Media Forums Web press/vide o SMS/ call Advertisers TV Magazine/N ewspaper Instagram Online product comparison/ reviews TV Magazine/New spaper eDM Info Emo Self
- 37. Bottom line Know what data you want to gather and what it should measure Understand your audience’s lifestyle and motivations Segment on a psychological level Adjust with the needs they have in their decision making process
- 38. Understand your offering from your audience’s perspective
- 39. YOUR JOB
- 40. Revisit your offerings within MY lifestyle How does your product help me reach my goals in life? Does it reflect my own interests and values? When am I going to be interested in using your product? When would it solve my problems? Why is your product relevant to my life? How does your product help me maintain or improve my lifestyle? Will your product help me continue to be happy? Will your product help me to avoid becoming unhappy? 1 2 3 4
- 41. Stop talking about yourself. Content should supplement a larger discussion for engagement Provide content that provides value (emotional, functional, self)
- 42. Deeper taxonomies Folksonomies/Collaborative tagging – creating meaningful indexes
- 43. 75% of its subscribers decide what to watch based on Netflix recommendations It has 76,897 distinct movie categories "People consume more hours of video and stick with the service longer when we use these tags.” – Todd Yellin, VP of product innovation, creator of the Netflix taxonomy
- 44. Find film geeks Create genres Measure behaviour Display unique recommend ations Evaluate success of new content Netflix owns deep taxonomy "It's a real combination: machine-learned, algorithms, algorithmic syntax and also a bunch of geeks who love this stuff going deep.” Todd Yellin
- 45. "We were doing a really good job with mathematical crunching, but we needed to know our content better. That requires real humans.” Todd Yellin Revisit your taxonomy Create psychographic and deep- level tags (humans) Create tags based on categories your audience uses to evaluate content (humans) Identify the behaviours important in how users consume your content (humans) Personalise based on the intersection of behavioural patterns and deep-level tags (automated)
- 46. Deeper tags Tags: Indonesia Video Learning Children Dreams Inspiration Aspirational Imagination Reading Motivational Invest in future Author: founder Donation Volunteer Rural Poverty First person Medium length Uplifting Empowering 8/7/2015 Architects of digital change 46 • Emotional reaction is important to this client • Deeper info on plot • Deeper info on type of writing style (first person)
- 47. More successful articles had more humanizing sentences in them 0% 1% 2% 3% 4% 5% 6% 7% 8% 9% 10% 1.9 2 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 Percentageofsentenceswith humanizingwords Weighted rank of stories 8/7/2015 Architects of digital change 47 There was a positive relationship between success of the article and how many times a comparison was made between the subject and the reader (i.e., “whether their lives are really so different from our own”, “we all have the same colour spine”) Data obtained for June 20 – July 20, 2014 from Google Analytics for top 5 and bottom 5 stories
- 48. Taxonomy data can be predictive Good taxonomy is insightful Netflix chose to produce House of Cards based on knowing people’s habits viewing David Fincher and Kevin Spacey films, and how well similar genres had done (House of Cards, UK original series) Taxonomy helps target marketing Kevin Spacey fans saw ads with Kevin Spacey “Thelma and Louise” fans saw trailers showcasing female characters Film connoisseurs saw trailers that focused on David Fincher’s directing
- 49. Bottom line Content direction is fueled by knowing your audiences on a MUCH deeper level Your message and your offerings are expected to be part of a broader dialogue in your audiences’ lives Your taxonomy needs to be just as deep as how you know your audience
- 50. Understand my needs through time Ask the right question What drives me to do something (motivation)? What stops me from reaching my goals (hurdles)? What makes me refocus on my goals (triggers)? How do I want to be seen (self)? How does it make me feel (emotional)? Am I knowledgeable enough about the problem/solution (functional)? How does the my question change through the decision process? Where do I find the information I need during the decision process? So what? – KNOW ME
- 51. Reevaluate your current content/offerings The solution has to be based on humans, not on algorithms Categorise your content/products/services with labels that make sense to your user (they don’t even need to be visible to your user) Identify behaviours that will be measured and what they mean Make these categories help you learn about your audience on a deeper level Why should I care about what you have to offer me? Do you have a place in the dialogue I’m already having? So what? – KNOW YOUR PRODUCT
- 52. Would she buy this?
- 54. Content affects how we problem solve In work we did with a housing development company in the UK, the way content was framed momentarily changed how people believed they approached problem solving.
Editor's Notes
- I’m from Reading Room, we’re a digital communications consultancy, originally from London and one of the top UX companies in Singapore. I’m part of their specialist consultants group,
- And I look at human interaction with technology and digital communication with a specialisation in APAC. I like to tell people that I’m the bad type of doctor, I can’t prescribe you medication, I can’t save your life, and I can’t explain why your boss is crazy.
- What do we know about human beings? Digital or not, we hate wasting time, we have shorter attention spans than ever, and we hate making decisions. In fact, in a study with doctors in a scenario of either taking medication or hip replacement, they found that if doctors were presented with easy decisions and many decisions, they’d take the easy decision even if it might have been worse for the patient. Another study showed that in presenting consumers with 24 jams versus 6 jams, only 12% will buy a jam out of the 24 versus 48% buying a jam when presented with 6 jams. We know that digital gives us unprecedented access to information, and presents options and arrays we may never have been provided with before. So people will talk about personalisation being more helpful in speaking to your users, and making your brand more intimate with user needs, but WHY is it so effective actually?
- It’s because personalisation presents us with relevant information that’s effortless, time efficient, and simple. It helps us cut through all the crap that’s now bombarding us on our phones, our tablets, computers, and now our watches. We’re more likely to stay, we are more likely to think positively about our experience with a brand, purely because we didn’t have to think too hard. Purely because we waste less time and accomplish what we want.
- So let’s start off with an example and see how personalisation would apply here. What things would we need to know about her in order to personalise to her? What would we need to know in order to actually speak to her? So write down or think about maybe 10 crucial questions you’d like to ask her in the next few seconds.
- What questions did you want to ask her? How many had questions like 1, 2, or 3? How about 4 or 5?
- Typically, when we think of personalisation, we think of these top 4 things. If we’re really good, we’ll also throw in the 5th one. This is how we target people, and I’ll be honest, it’s easier this way. But if we want to get an edge in terms of really understanding our customers, we need to go a bit deeper. We need to explore 6 – 9.
- Part of personalisation means knowing your audience and knowing them well. We usually do this by targeting specific types of audience members – we segment them into meaningful parts. What I’m hear to tell you is that business as usual segmentation isn’t working. If we want true personalisation the way that our users expect it, we have to go much farther than we are now. So I showed you an example of buying wrinkle cream. Fair enough, but let’s take a real world example of why it’s important to go deeper in our understanding of our audience.
- A good example is the segment of “mothers.” How do we market to “mothers?” Well, it turns out that “mothers” as we’ve segmented them, isn’t working. From a whole slew of studies, both in the UK, China, and South East Asia, it’s clear that “mothers” do not identify with and are sometimes offended by the way that mothers are portrayed. Marketers are marketing something that real mothers do not identify with. Why is this? http://www.marketingmagazine.co.uk/article/1344066/why-marketing-mums-broken http://www.theguardian.com/media-network/marketing-agencies-association-partner-zone/2014/sep/04/truth-marketing-mums-uk-advertising http://www.stylus.com/gctlgm http://www.digitalmarket.asia/asian-moms-primary-home-decision-makers-are-going-mobile-first/ http://www.ogilvy.com/News/Press-Releases/March-2010-Mums-the-Word-a-New-Study-from-Ogilvy-China.aspx
- So this is business as usual. A marketer will say “we need to market to moms.” We can segment them by their children or their home life – this is all a mother cares about anyway right? This is what defines mothers as mothers. The real question then becomes – do mothers actually segment themselves this way? Do they only see themselves as caretakers of their children? Do they only see themselves as dominating the home ground or juggling a career?
- And of course, the answer is no. This is merely part of how mothers see themselves in their new role. This is part of the reason that mother blogs are so popular, because the blogs are segmented by much more nuanced topics. In fact, a study of 900 moms found that 81% read more than 5 blogs a week, 84% of those reading blogs based on authentic content that interests them. So yes, a mother may consider her career choices and yes, she will have specific needs related to how she approaches parenting as her child or children develop. But she still has other interests that also are important that are influential to or change because of motherhood. We have interests here at the top, you go further down and maybe it’s emotions and attitudes, and at the bottom perhaps how her identity has changed. Why do mothers trust other mothers? Why do mothers trust blogging mothers? Because they are real people with complicated lives and interests that are similar to their own. Marketers don’t provide them with someone they find to be real or relatable. So if marketers want to enter in the conversation, they need to throw away their 2 dimensional models because that’s not how people are. http://www.newmediaandmarketing.com/81-of-moms-read-5-blogs-per-week/
- Segmentation has gone from demographics and simple levels, to deep and nuanced levels. It should be multidimensional and show different and important facets of how your audiences see themselves, it should be psychological and reveal their fears, desires, and motivations. It should be holistic and encompass an overview of their lifestyle.
- So today I want to talk about ways in which you can start to know your audience better and then how you can use that knowledge to find out how to better understand, evaluate, and create your content.
- It starts with research. Most research – how we normally do it – is we get a whole bunch of people into a room and we ask them what they want. We ask them opinions on a product you have or want to create. If we created said product or went with said campaign – would you like it? What features in this product would make it better? I’m not saying these questions might not be helpful at some point. But it’s not what a user’s job is supposed to be. We hire marketers to understand the best ways to engage an audience they know a lot about. We don’t hire marketers to ask people they don’t know a lot about to tell them how they need to be engaged with. It’s like asking your wife what she’d like for her birthday. You could do that and get her what she says she wants. But what she wants is to not have to be asked. SHE WANTS YOU TO KNOW.
- So if you go with business as usual, you basically know how they feel, sitting in a room, with this random product in their hands. The problem with this line of questioning is that you don’t really know what they’re like. You know how they perceive the box right now. But how would they actually use it in their real lives? Like it or not, human beings are horrible at foretelling how they’ll actually feel about events or things. Studies have shown that participants asked to describe how they’d feel in different scenarios, all participants were less accurate the more in the future the scenarios were. Not only were they less accurate about how’d they feel, they also overestimated the extent to these feelings. For instance, “how happy will you be if we create this product that you’re holding?” do you see where the danger is on relying on people’s assumptions about how they think they’ll feel or what they think they’ll need? http://www.psych.nyu.edu/trope/Liberman%20et%20al.,%202002%20-%20JESP.pdf
- So how do we change what we know? We have to change the type of questions we ask our users. Our objective shouldn’t be how they feel about whatever it is you’re trying to sell them. Your objective is to understand what their lifestyle is like. What goes on in their head when they face hard decisions? And this doesn’t mean you can ask them point blank. It means that you have to start getting creative about how you get information out. For instance, maybe you need to know how they’ve reacted in a variety of situations. Maybe you need to see what other things they’ve already purchased. What events have they been really stressed out in?
- Research should tell you what is going on in here. What makes them tick? What surprises them and delights them. What makes them angry or scared? What are their interests? What do they spend their most time on? What do they spend their most time dreaming about? Your job as a marketer is to understand that world they’ve created, and find out how your product or service fits into that world. If you can’t figure it out – you’re not doing your job. It’s not their job, it’s yours.
- So once you’ve delved deeper into your audience, you can truly start to segment them on richer details. I call these psychographic personas. They still may have demographic elements, like they might have a certain profession, or be of a certain socioeconomic status. If gender is important, then they might be a certain gender. The thing is, the details that are NOT important to the persona shouldn’t be included. So I shouldn’t tell you it’s a girl if being a girl is not important. You should be designing for a boy or a girl. But I need to be able to tell you that this persona is driven by a need to be seen, whereas this persona is driven by a need for assurance and safety. These are motivations that change how they process information, what things they find important, and what they will best react to. These are the things that you need to understand when you are creating content, communicating, designing, and building.
- Born elsewhere – is he actually an expat? How important is family? Is it important that he focuses on local brands? Does that say something about his character? Is it important that he’s working for a large agency like Ogilvy? Is his musical interest an indicator for a greater artistic passion? He was a backpacker – does he not care for luxury now? He spent a whole weekend just on researching a purchase, does he do the same for travel or only music? He seems adventurous since he backpacked and tries new foods, does he want the same in a hotel? There’s a lot of clues here and a lot of conclusions I can make, but are they good conclusions?
- This is where we need to add in psychological elements into the persona. Instead of telling us what he is doing and focusing on the behaviours, we need to understand WHY he is doing them. What is driving his behaviour? We start with motivations and drives, what moves people towards their goals and aspirations? What are his attitudes and emotions towards his goal? Then we need to look at the hurdles or the barriers – are there things that cause him to be put off by something? What are things that stop him from achieving his goals? And then we should look at triggers, so in all the things that he thinks about on a daily basis, what catches his attention enough to change his thinking and turn his attention towards this particular goal? Let’s take an example of some personas we did for a military social networking site. We were tasked with finding out if they needed a mobile app. Business as usual would say that we should get the veterans all in a room and ask them if they had a mobile app what things they would like in it, what features they would use. But this shouldn’t be business as usual – we should know what they need. We took a step back to look at why they used it. Military veterans are not all the same. They have very different motivations for going to the website and it can’t easily be boxed into the military branch they were in or how long they had been veterans. We had to segment them through their different motivations.
- I’ll go over 2 of the 3 personas we identified. We found this persona, blood brothers and sisters to be individuals that went to the site to be part of a community. They had strong emotional needs and were motivated to find social support with like-minded people who understood the experiences they went through. It could be just from jokes and chats with people that “got military life” all the way to finding others who were suffering from PTSD.
- We then identified the motivations they had – towards social support from like-minded people, their attitudes and emotions that might trigger them to think about reconnecting, such as the belief that military veterans are your family, or feeling isolated or lonely, and then we looked at the behaviours that came about because of these motivations and attitudes such as going onto forums and chatting with new found friends. Then we looked at how this fits into their mobile needs – what mobile features would help support this lifestyle? They’d need optimised forum functions, ability to create group chats, notifications on forum activity.
- Contrast this with the second persona we created. This group of individuals go on the website specifically to connect with people they know, either to boost their career and keep professional communication in a military setting, or to reconnect with friends that they served with during their time in the military.
- When we look at their motivations, it’s very different – they want to reconnect with familiar faces. The attitudes around this is that the military creates ties that they can tap into, they are emotionally triggered by feelings of curiosity “What’s this guy up to now?” and nostalgia “Remember the time when…” and thus their behaviours are very different. They are searching for specific people and then contacting them directly. They don’t care to go on forums because they don’t need to meet new people, just reconnect with old friends. So their mobile needs are different. They need optimised search functionalities, ability for quick private chats and notifications on private messages. Notice that they are all veterans. But they fall into distinct psychological categories that in turn, can explain very different behaviours, and helps us to understand what product we need to create for them. We can create a mobile app, but to personalise it to these audiences, we need to know about what it means to connect on that site first.
- Another important factor is that individuals needs and motivations change over time. In order to personalise affectively, we need to be able to develop with them.
- How do consumers decide to engage with your products or services? These are the types of questions people think about when they seek information, when they evaluate your product or service, if they want to decide your product or service is important to them. This is the importance of user research. We need to understand not only how they would answer these questions, but more importantly, how your brand helps them achieve these things. We need to understand their lifestyle and how our products fit into them. What part of their busy life are we satisfying? How does our product or service fit into their existing ecosystem of things and events?
- So lets go back to our first example about this girl who we want to be interested in this wrinkle cream.
- notice when she first sees a need for an anti-aging product, she’s probably thinking about how she appears to others, what she’d like to be, and also looks through different channels to find out how she matches her own ideal.
- So she’s reading a lot about what she can do, looking at what others she admires has done, and she’s decided she probably should up her skin care game. She’s reading about skin care routines and what you should do and what you should have. Ahh, she thinks she needs a serum.
- she needs to find out about all the properties of these different skin care products to find out which one matches her needs. There are so many serums out there, she’s looking at specific ingredients and also looking at what the outcome of those serums is, does it create a result she was looking for? Is it going to feel better about taking proactive steps to take care of her skin?
- So now she has done all her research and she’s found your serum, it meets all her criteria, makes her feel relieved about how well it works, and perhaps it’s a reputable and popular brand. For instance, using La Mer products is perceived differently from using Maybelline.
- Notice that purchasing is always painful. And you could easily lose them at this step even if they had originally decided on buying your product
- Now they are evaluating your product, does it make them feel better, are they among a certain enviable group of women that use it, are other people finding success as they did?
- So bottom line, know what you want to know about your audience on a deeper level. Make sure that you are finding out about their lifestyle – go broader to know their lifestyle and their larger motivations in the field where your product or service is most applicable. Then segment them based on these different motivations or these different behaviours. And lastly, make sure that you are addressing the specific needs they have by understanding the purchase journey at a deeper level.
- Now you know about who your audience is and what they want, fear, and hope for. Now what?
- Now we can answer a bit about the person, our task is to figure out how we fit what we are offering into their lives to make it relevant. Is it a product, a service, even a message? Now we know what the context is so it’s a lot easier to start to position things based on what we know they will emotionally react to already.
- We need to go back to their lifestyle as well as where you think they are on the purchasing journey. What information are they looking for? Does your product or service answer some of the questions they are asking currently? Does your product or offering occur in a related field that will generate talk and awareness? What emotions are your audience experiencing? Are we taking away a negative emotion and bringing relief? Or are we increasing someone’s positive feelings? We need to know the emotional reactions that are important to tap into for your audience.
- A good example is Dove. They joined into the conversation and became relevant again because they weren’t talking about hygiene, which is what most of Dove’s products are for. What they did was align themselves with a lifestyle or an ideology that people can understand and identify with and enter into a conversation that people are already talking about, just not with brands. It’s a highly emotional topic, and hygiene is related to how people perceive each other and themselves. They just made hygiene meaningful on a very personal and empowering level and they did it without pushing their individual products or the benefits of those products. This is important in framing your content. What is the content that people will want to consume and how does your contribution add value to their life and incidentally, their perception of your brand in their life? Dove managed to create content that helped individuals align their brand with a lifestyle of authenticity and self-acceptance.
- The other side of the coin is communicating with audiences at an implicit level. It’s not necessarily in what you say or how you say it. It might be in making an experience effortless and “intuitive.” People talk about intuition, and part of personalisation is not just in speaking their language, but providing people with things that they need when they need it. This is part of the big push now for personalisation – how do we do this? And many companies will swear that they’ve got the magic algorithm to make things perfectly personalised for each audience member. This is only half the story. One thing that I want to argue is that our AI is not intelligent enough to mimic human wants and needs. It’s getting better and better, but machines still have a very hard time understanding humans. They can’t perceive sarcasm, innuendo, and many of the subtleties of how humans communicate their feelings, wants, and desires. Our technology is extremely good at doing complex calculations quickly though. So if we give them the right inputs, they can output some amazing things to you, but we’re still at a point where we have to make sure that those inputs are highly meaningful. One of the ways that this has been done is through taxonomies that are created by people. These taxonomies allow computers to find patterns that are as deep or as shallow as you want. It depends on the sophistication of the taxonomy. For instance, Pinterest uses folksonomies, where pictures are tagged but based on the community’s categorisation of the tags. So the more someone pins a photo to a specific board, the more knowledge is gained about that photo. For instance, even though I have a board called Style, because I’ve pinned photos that have been tagged by more specific board names, such as “minimalism” or “classic fashion”, over time, Pinterest starts to learn that even though I put that pin in “Style”, my “style” is actually an amalgamation of a specific type of style that others have categorised more specifically. They then know to serve me content that has similar tags – even if I didn’t ask for it and even though I am unaware of the tag it’s under.
- And the mother of all deep level taxonomies is Netflix. According to netflix, 75% of its subscribers watch what is personally selected for them. This means that Netflix needs to be really, really good at recommending to keep people coming back. In fact, it may also be because of their amazing recommendation system that so many people trust and consume things that Netflix has recommended to them. In 2006, Netflix had a contest with a reward of 1 million dollars to anyone who could create an algorithm that could accurately guess how someone would rate what they watched better than Netflix’s own algorithm. By 2007, over 20,000 teams from 150 countries had entered the competition. They awarded it in 2009 to BellKor for improving accuracy by 10% but by that time, Netflix had a system that was even more accurate. It couldn’t compete with their tagging system. Their taxonomy system is highly sophisticated. They use over 1000 “microtags” where they tag almost everything you could imagine, from the plot to the likability of the main character. Because of that, they have created all these combinations together to form over 76,897 distinct movie categories. So Netflix can be super precise in the tastes that its viewers have.
- So how does this tagging system work and why is it important in how we personalise content? So netflix tracked down a bunch of film aficionados that love to watch films and will pick out unusual details that we all might check out when we’re watching something, but don’t fall nicely into a “horror” genre. They tag deeply, with things like rating how romantic the movie is, what type of plot does it follow, and intelligent or cerebral the material is, and emotional things like the squirm factor of the situations the characters find themselves in. You’ve all seen those types of comedies, comedies where people are in absolutely embarrassing and humiliating situations. Then they create genres based on all those taxonomies, these genres are highly detailed because the taxonomies are detailed. Mother-Son Movies from the 1970s Critically-acclaimed Emotional Underdog Movies Gritty Suspenseful Revenge Westerns Feel-good Romantic Spanish-Language TV Shows Remember that all these tags and all these genres are behind the scenes. No one actually knows what the categories are, they just know that they are now getting the content they want. Now they have the tools to understand their content on a very human level and their genres are so specific that they can provide a super accurate understanding of exactly the tastes and emotions that individuals prefer in the content they consume. Now all they need to know is what individuals are consuming and match those genres to the people. This is where technology shines. Technology can show how long they look at an item, what they search for, what they click on, what they stop watching, when they watch it. These are all important indicators of engagement with the material. Because they have the a deep knowledge of the content, they can piece together a deeper knowledge of the user based on these actions now. You can collect all the actions but not know what it means, but if you know what the content means on a personal level, then it makes sense. Then you can display recommendations knowing what is driving them to watch certain things – the taxonomy helps in identifying underlying themes that might not be apparent in knowing their ratings of films. And the crowning glory of Netflix is being able to use this rich knowledge to predict what people will want to watch, which is precisely what they did when they launched their first TV show – House of Cards. "My first goal was: tear apart content!" – Todd Yellin, VP of product innovation, creator of the Netflix taxonomy
- So what is the moral of this story? Technology is great – but personalisation still means adding in the human element. There is no algorithm thus far that understands the weird and quirky nature of how our brain works and processes things – not yet anyway. What we need to look into are hybrid solutions. This means providing a very well researched and thought out way of categorising information. So we need to understand firstly how people evaluate information (this is why you need to know your audience on a psychological level). Then you need to identify what behaviours are going to be important in understanding how people consume your content – is device important? Is time important? Once you’ve put those two things together, you’ve created something that can be automated, because it has human thinking behind it. So often, we create algorithms, and then try to figure out afterwards what those behaviours could have meant. We need to change that, by starting off with knowing our own content better.
- A good example of this is with a client we had that would share inspirational online written or video stories. For instance, we could tag them based on surface level information like location, type of media used… but we can create deeper tags such as the emotions that are felt from these types of stories, the central character in the story, the writing style that is used. In fact, they use a type of folksonomy by allowing individuals to emotionally rate each article that they read. Again, these tags are in the CMS, they aren’t there necessarily for all the viewers to see. But they help our clients understand more about their users.
- Here’s a good example of how we used categories to better understand the success of their content. For instance we worked with them to come up with a definition of a successful story. It had to be a story that people stayed on longer, was a unique page that they visited, and where people didn’t leave once they read it. Then we looked at how many words in the articles were considered humanizing. Meaning how many sentences in the whole article had words that related the reader to the main character of the story? We found that the more these types of sentences were used, the more likely people stayed on the story longer and didn’t leave once they finished reading. This is important in also identifying patterns in what people want when they consume content – on a much deeper level, not just based on location or word count.
- This is the power of understanding your content deeply. It can help you understand new things that people are looking for. Many people think that data can only tell you what has already happened, and can’t predict more radical shifts. But taxonomy that is slightly more abstract, that taps into underlying motivations and fears can open up new possibilities. Motivations and fears don’t always go away with the advent of different products, they are usually constant drives that account for consumption behaviour of many things, old and new. This was the case for Netflix, as I told you about their endorsement of House of Cards. In its first season, it received 9 Emmy nominations, winning 3. Moreover, it is the most popular series on all of Netflix currently. But they knew it would be a success even before they signed the papers because they understand psychologically what intrigues people and they even can guess how popular it will be based on the actors and director in it. And the coup de grace for why you need to understand how people view content – the taxonomy was also helpful in targeting advertising of House of Cards so that trailers were more personalised based on what people liked to watch. http://variety.com/2015/digital/news/netflix-originals-viewer-data-1201480234/
- So the big bottom line – we need to go deeper in how we know our audience and how we know our content – this means looking into the psychology of our audiences, their loves, hates, dreams, and desires. We need to understand how they react emotionally, what scares them, what excites them, not JUST what it was they consumed. The way that we tailored messages should be embedded in a dialogue that is already important to your audience and this sometimes means it’s not about your product per se. And lastly, matching the depth of our content to the depth of our audience allows for much more relevant personalisation and future insight into what speaks to them most.
- To sum up my talk, we need to look at the audience on a personal level. We need to revisit how we do research and what questions are the right questions to ask. Do we ask questions on motivations, hurdles, and triggers? Do we know their self, emotional, and functional information needs? Secondly, we need to understand that this is a process and the motivations, hurdles, triggers, and information needs change over time. Personalisation should help to identify those points to get it right.
- And the second half of the equation is knowing your product as deeply as you should know your audience. To personalise well, it needs to be a combination of both human understanding and machine strength. This means categorising content in ways similar to how your audience categorises them, deeply with psychological elements to them. It means knowing what the machine should be measuring. Secondly, you need to revisit your content from the point of view of the audience member – why should they care about you? How do you fit in their lives and their conversations? And as netflix showed, you can do both, by using what you know from your rich, human-based data collection to understand what dialogue is going to ring true to its viewers.
- SO the next time you’re faced with this challenge, remember to think about her motivations and emotions and how they might change over time. Look at your product based specifically on how it meets her personal motivations and emotions. Remember, personalisation means taking the pain out of searching and choosing. It IS about motivations and emotions - It should get us closer to our goals and make us feel happier about the decisions we make.