Have you ever received an email from a brand that was directly addressed to you or was related to things you bought from them previously? If so, then you already know a little bit about personalisation. Now, thanks to the age of analytics, marketers can achieve hyper-personalisation.
What is Hyper-Personalisation?
Hyper-personalisation requires artificial intelligence (AI) to deliver a customer experience which takes into account what individual visitors buy, where they are engaged and how they like to get their information. It requires a data-driven approach and multiple technologies to work together to deliver a hyper-targeted customer experience.
To understand what hyper-personalisation is, let’s look at it in relation to good old fashioned personalisation.
Personalisation is essentially the attempt to deliver a more tailored experience to your customers. For example, you might receive an email from a large company that has your name on it. That would be personalisation. Hyper-personalisation, on the other hand, would be sending you an email which had used algorithms to determine your previous shopping habits and then created an offer which was tailored just for you.
A more famous example of hyper-personalisation as a service is Netflix. When Netflix recommend films, they do so based on your previous viewing habits. However, that’s not all. Quite creepily, they will also target you with images from films and shows which the algorithms think will work better. This briefly made headlines around the world when they advertised shows to black viewers by showing them pictures of black characters, despite the fact that the characters were only in the films for a few minutes.
There are clearly the right ways and wrong ways to implement hyper-personalisation, yet we’ll likely see a lot more mistakes like this happening in the future.
Real World Uses of Hyper-Personalisation
Hyper-personalisation will likely start having more of an impact on the real world over the coming years, as supermarkets, shops and restaurants begin implementing AI into their stores.
In the future, we will likely see businesses take a greater interest in the way we operate when we are in their stores and see them attempt to tailor our experiences for us.
The Ethical Problems of Hyper-Personalisation
One of the problems with Hyper-personalisation will be how it affects the choices we have put in front of us. Project Veritas has recently attempted to shine a light on some of the practices used by Google to influence US election results. Similarly, Facebook has been accused of creating echo chambers, which hyper-personalisation will inevitably lead to.
The issue with hyper-personalisation is that the desire to give people what they want will trump giving them what they need and this could eventually lead to many problems.
If people are only ever given the information they want, then they will never hear the other side of the story, hence the rise of echo chambers and much of the divisiveness currently being seen in Western nations.
The influence of marketers is currently experiencing a heyday, however, the repercussions of this could lead to its downfall if the next step isn’t handled with care.