RE: Is personalization really personal?

From: Kevin Rice <kevin_at_visitcard.com>
Date: Tue, 10 Aug 1999 13:44:03 -0500 (CDT)

***Firstly I should like to make it clear that my opinions
are based purely on 'gut-feel' and do not result from many
years of studying marketing as an academic subject. As a
result my use of terminologies may not be 100% correct. I
thought that I would confess to this at the start of my post
and save many of you the trouble of pointing it out for me!
8-)***

The original posting from Mr Tim Lee seems to have excited
some very learned and erudite responses from authors that
clearly know a great deal about the subject, so who am I to
say that they are wrong? Nevertheless I would like to submit
the following for the record:

Mr Lee uses, by way of an example, the book recommendation
system employed by Amazon. He asserts that this cannot be
'one-to-one marketing' as the system relies on knowledge of
a group (be it a small one) and not only knowledge of the
individual. Surely this is a very fair point!

To me the phrase 'one-to-one marketing' has to imply that a
marketer has acheived the ultimate segmentation within his
target audience by creating profiles for each and every
individual. This can only be acheived if the marketer
possesses knowledge of each and every individual and can
only be practiced if the marketer ignores his knowledge of
every other individual when dealing with a single customer.

If Amazon knew that I had previously purchased 'Marketing
Gods - Volume 1' and on a subsequent visit they highlighted
the availability of 'Marketing Gods - Volume 2', then that
would be 'one-to-one marketing'?... wouldn't it?

If they just tell me that other people (who have been
grouped alongside me by their database) have also purchased
'Marketing Blunders From Hell' then surely I have been
included in a target group of more than one, which must
imply a 'one-to-many' marketing technique?

TIM LEE WROTE:
>I hope next time before anybody writes or publishes an
>article about personalization, implements or helps other
>implement personalization, he/she needs to understand what
>personalization really means.

This appears to be semantics and I wouldn't dare to offer an
opinion after the seemingly very well informed posting from
Mr Cooper. On this one Mr Lee, you are on your own! 8-)

Kevin Rice

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Received on Tue Aug 10 1999 - 14:10:02 CDT