The well-known American behaviorist B.F. Skinner once made light of the fact that rats learn through experience as opposed to people. Undoubtedly a funny statement, but it’s not entirely true—people are primarily creatures of habit. Predicting a customer’s future purchase becomes considerably simpler for marketers if they have a thorough understanding of those patterns on both a micro and macro level. Combining the forecasts of thousands of customers might go a long way toward affecting future purchases by a group of customers in addition to simply forecasting what they might make next. But it’s not simple to achieve it. The data required for personalisation is difficult to gather, manage, clean, and analyze, but artificial intelligence (AI) can help.
Customizing an experience, a product, or a communication based on knowledge a corporation has gained about a person or group is known as personalization. It is focused on the target consumer, meeting that consumer’s specific demands, and incorporating those needs into the company’s product or service.
Influencing behavior has long been the goal of marketing. The end objective is frequently to get people to purchase goods they want, desire, and may not actually need. It is a business of subtly manipulating people’s emotions, but it has grown extremely complex for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the complexity of the modern marketing environment.
Hellscape in real time
Dan Woods presents a humorous comparison between the vastly different marketing environment a marketer faces now and what his 1980s predecessor could have faced in his piece How Real-time Marketing Technology Can Transform Your Business. Woods explains:
“Marketing and market research are now more akin to multiplayer first-person shooter games than golf, thanks to technology. The sly marketers, dressed in business-casual camouflage, are crouched behind a hut evaluating their tools for delivering outbound communications. Email marketing initiatives, public relations efforts, gatherings, blogging, tweeting, white papers, apps, banner ads, Google Ad Words, and social media outreach are a few examples. The fearless marketers get up and start firing, using their guns not to harm customers but to draw them to their websites, deals, and communities. You gain incoming traffic if the weapons are effective.
