Marketing in a Personalized Way

Personalized business starts to boom as a result of free purchasing, self-driven speech, information support and various tastes.

Virtual economy released a powerful financial force into the consumer market during the stable period ahead of western economic crisis, which has turned out to stimulate the explosion of numerous innovative information. Generally, it further increases the personalized demand in western world.

At least three target groups in China are highly acceptable to the trends of personalization: the emerging wealthy class, the student and occupation class of 80s, the student class of 90s. These three groups are capable of making purchasing decisions out of their own will, and probably would engage themselves in the pursuit of distinctive products and services while still reserving enough room in their lifestyle for the marketers to develop. Moreover, the updating information can keep an ongoing influence on the demand of this group, and thus personalized expressions of needs are presented on different levels.

Three levels of personalized demand are hereby summarized:

Fake personalization. It’s kind of so-called personalization without any actual characteristic content, for instance, a number of fashion brands prefer including this word in their promotional materials to introduce their products. In my experience, I’ve seen many premium apartments which publicized with a sign of “Personalized” but in fact showed no differences from the others at all.

Near personalization. Personalization of this kind often refers to the consumption of trend leading groups, which is proven to reveal the differences among various groups rather than the differences embodied in every individual, for instance, IPOD and MUJI are typical cases of this kind.

Real personalization. In brief, a unique and exclusive mark is attached to the product in demand, which is seldom accepted by the others due to its particular pattern, styles, elements and combination modes. Products and services with this feature are usually provided with a high price because of very limited amount of consumers, and they are known as “Products of superior design” and “Products of scalable design”. From the view of business, the first and the second type better fit in scale operation, yet the third type is more suitable for expanding the market of art products or luxury products.

As a management mode oriented by demand, when the personalized needs emerge and gradually grow to a certain scale, there’s certainly a lot more to achieve for personalized marketing.

Product design shall be deemed as the breakthrough point of personalized marketing, and compared with other modes of marketing, the close connection between marketing and design has been achieved for the first time owing to the characteristics of personalized marketing. Besides, by implementing the spirit of “Redesign is possible for every part of the product”, the structure, the form and the style of the product can be easily adjusted and improved so as to delight the consumers with fascinating results.

Personalized marketing puts forward a higher requirement for the updating cycle. To be specific, a quality personalization doesn’t necessarily mean to issue a large amount of new content very frequently, instead it is recommended to update and replace the old concept in a frequent manner via the real-time tracing of audiences’ preference to obtain dynamic status.

If personalization is bound to grow throughout the marketing field in the coming years, it can be predicted that marketers’ attention would be laid on a systemic analysis about the personalized marketing, especially in terms of formulating a feasible financial scheme. Last but not the least, relevant marketers shall, in the first place, attempt to work out the solution of the paradox: How to balance the traditional marketing way with a certain scale and the personalized marketing way without a large scale.