Hyper-Personalized Consumer Experiences

You thought you had it all figured out. All your brand needed to do was provide some product customization, a few innovative products, and your business would continue to grow. But for some reason, sales are flat, and your competitors continue to gain market share. What’s going on here?

It turns out that a simple customization strategy combined with good product isn’t enough anymore. The New Consumer is looking for personalization; and not just for products, but in every area of customer engagement. Whether it’s product personalization, consumer segmentation, consumer journey mapping, or behavioral data analysis; personalization is now a critical component across every channel and every customer metric. This is the new benchmark; this is Hyper-Personalization.

To become a best-in-class brand, it is critical to address unique consumer needs. Hyper-Personalization is about customizing all activities and, as a result, building fierce consumer loyalty. Companies do this in a number of ways; customizing product is the most obvious, but it is just as important to personalize the shopping experience. This can be done by tailoring recommendations and by mapping the customer journey—personalizing the customer experience across all interactions and all channels. This provides the ability to constantly analyze consumer feedback in order to build the best possible shopping experience from first contact to becoming a repeat buyer.

For brands selling consumer products, it is absolutely vital to build and deliver top-notch consumer experiences. Research shows that best-in-class brands are 61% more likely to customize products and the timing of shopper interactions to differentiate themselves and boost their margins. The result for these brands is increased customer loyalty and increased customer spending. The bottom line? Hyper-Personalization creates happy customers, and happy customers become repeat customers who buy more products. However, differentiation isn’t only about personalization, it also requires immersive shopping experiences that make use of AR/VR, 3D technologies, and video to solve selling problems that can’t be solved using traditional means. It means re-thinking the decades old, e-commerce selling model and injecting true innovation in the shopping experience, not just in the product.

Every brand strives to achieve that elusive status of “iconic”, yet only 17% of companies are satisfied with their ability to deliver tailored shopping experiences. One of the key ways of building an iconic brand is through differentiation, but this is also where many brands struggle. Hyper-Personalization is one of the few clear ways that to achieve differentiation and can be accomplished through a myriad of ways. Voice of Customer (VoC) is one such way where customer feedback is incorporated in all areas of the business; from design, merchandising, selling, and customer experience. This builds a set of shared expectations between the brand and the shopper.

Hyper-Personalization is also accomplished by connecting the “front end” shopping experience with a clear line of sight from the “back end” product creation engine. Many companies still operate on a siloed, “over-the-wall” process where one role hands product information off to the next without communication of unique selling features for the customer. Hyper-Personalization ensures that unique customer selling features are injected—and communicated—at every step of bringing product to market. This closes the loop of the total product experience; one where the product, the journey, the experience, and even the product feedback is made unique to each customer. At every step, the New Consumer is made to feel valued and understood. It’s this shared understanding between brand and individual that creates the fierce loyalty that best-in-class brands create. And Hyper-Personalization is the key.