Personalization, personalization, personalization. It’s the marketer’s buzzword of the moment. Marketers are convinced that more than 70% of consumers demand it, and they’ll walk if they don’t get it.
What personalization means exactly is not always clear. If it means you don’t have to re-enter your credit card on your 5th purchase from a website, then true enough, consumers probably get pretty annoyed if they can’t get that level of personalization.
But if personalization means your YouTube feed or the TikTok algorithm, then beware.
You may or may be aware what has happened to folks when they’ve followed YouTube down the rabbit hole of something like ‘Flat Earth’. They got drawn into an alternate, delusional, and frightening universe. An echo chamber. A weirdo’s hall of mirrors. A circus labyrinth of crazy clown world.
A world in which they heard and saw the same damn wrong thing over and over and over and over again until they believed it. True story.
A world in which people are effectively blocked off from the variety and beauty of the world, a desert devoid of learning, of growth, of curiosity, in which life gets narrower and narrower so that consumers can be more effectively ‘segmented’, marketed to, manipulated, tyrannized, lied to, deceived, and well, fucked the fuck over.
It seems so innocent:
For example, the receptionist can automatically reserve customers a massage with a masseuse they previously visited. Unless you didn’t like that masseuse, and you don’t want technology ‘automatically’ choosing anything for you. When technology does things for you automatically, you don’t know what you’re missing. You don’t know if there’s another masseuse or another type of massage that you might want to try or that you might like better or that might suit your current circumstances better.
And that’s just business personalization. Wait until the government has all this ‘personalized’ information on you and uses it. Like the government in China does to identify and detain potential protestors.
Personalization, algorithms, technology – well, they’ve effectively destroyed so much of public life in the US, maybe irreparably. So far in the pursuit of excess profits.
The pursuit of excess profits has a history of doing that. Oh well.
The next frontier in the business world is personalized pricing, of course. In other words, pricing that’s higher for you than for everyone else. But if you want something – why should you pay the regular price? Why not pay the highest price possible? Who doesn’t love price discrimination?
Will ultra-personalization ever end?
It depends on how well it works – and what it works for. Personalized medicine might be a real boon to humanity. Personalized Netflix recommendations – maybe not so much.
The truth is, reducing everyone’s exposure to anything they haven’t already seen before, doesn’t just narrow the world for the individual who’s made to don horse-race blinders. It also narrows the world for the advertisers themselves. At least Spotify will suggest artists that are new to you. Although Spotify does have a genius for following a song I love with a song I hate. And my YouTube feed spent years recommending smooth jazz to me – and I hate smooth jazz.
So there you go. In reality, nobody knows exactly what they’re gonna like based on what they’ve liked before. Squid Game was a hit for Netflix not because everyone had seen Squid Game before – but because nobody had. In reality, most recommendations are laughably bad – unless you want to fit into some cultural cliche.
And you might. You might want to fit in somewhere and become a cultural cliche so that you can have a sense of belonging.
In which case, what you want is not so much personalization as lack of personalization. You want someone to tell you whatever else in your niche is buying so that you can buy it too.
It’s no wonder brands want to place you in a box so small it fits only you and allows you no room to move at all. Branding is hard work; business is frightening, and if there’s one thing every capitalist loves it’s lack of competition. There are statistics to consider, like this one:
your top 5% of customers generate 35%. Who wouldn’t want to personalize a loyalty program for their top 5% of customers? And the customer has every reason to appreciate that too. If they get a better deal as a result of that. Instead of a higher price. But naturally, a business wants your undying loyalty at the highest price possible. And there’s a conflict there.
Might be time to get pretty fed up.
Discover more from Get Pretty Fed Up
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
