Ad Age just published an article on Friday by Anthony Young and Norm Johnson on Adaptive Marketing, highlighting its booming and successful strategy that many brands have adopted. This includes Amazon.com’s shopping recommendations (that you can connect to Facebook for even more personalization) and Nike ID that lets you customize your own sneaks.  Mindshare defines this as:

An approach that enables marketers to truly tailor their activities in rapid and unparalleled ways to meet their customers’ interests and needs based on data. It’s not just about advertising, but adapting every part of the marketing mix as well as the product itself to connect more consumers with the brand, make it more relevant to everyone and deliver more benefits.

There are 3 aspects to adaptive marketing that the article addresses, and I’d like to approach them separately:

1 - When marketers and brands create relevant suggestions for products/services by collecting and tracking the users’ personal information and online activity to better understand them.

So this is the Amazon.com example, as well as familiar Facebook and Google ads that are relevant to you because they track your internet activity. Though privacy issues always come up, people are more and more willing to give up their privacy in exchange for a personalized experience that’s useful, valuable, and convenient to them. If the trade off isn’t good enough or if brands unlawfully do it without permission, that’s when you’ll obviously face some debacles - (i.e. Path’s recent heat for uploading users’ address book data without consent - ouch). 

2 - When brands empower the users with an active role in customization and choice.

This is Nike ID, or Kleenex’s new customizable tissue boxes (for who? For why? Ok maybe…), or KLM airline’s “Meet & Seat” where you choose who to sit next to based on LinkedIn/FB profiles (examples taken from the article). I think this niche is the most experimental and for lack of a better word, fun part of adaptive marketing - where the customer gets the chance to be part of the process of creating the product/service experience. 

Not to be cheesy or philosophical, but I want to touch on the fact that we’re all creators. It doesn’t matter if we’re right brained or left brained - we all have an innate creative aspect that takes joy in making things: composing music, growing a garden, starting a business, baking a cake, etc. We love to invest a piece of ourselves in objects and see our own reflection in it - it makes it ours. 

Thus something as simple as picking the colors of your next Nike sneaker is the same piece joy, an individual trademark, a personal creation. Though its usually pricier and more time consuming for brands to offer something like this, in the long run it’s a strong investment because it creates a psychological and experiential bond between the customer/creator and the brand/creation made by them, for them ( - just make sure it was a positive experience for them).

3 - When brands listen & respond.

Yes, thank you social media! Brands are using Facebook and Twitter to listen to their customers, and the brands that do well are the ones who quickly respond and address each situation (i.e. @JetBlue or @comcastcares). It requires a lot of individual attention and will force companies to shift their structure to “become more fluid and “always-on” rather than static and sporadic,“ but can be leveraged to create a positive, personal experience. Smart brands are also using these consumer feedback not only to address the individual situation, but use it to understand how to improve their business as a whole.

Adaptive marketing is all about creating a personal experience. Everyone wants to know that they are unique and special and be heard with the freedom and power of choice. Brands who treat them that way will be rewarded with loyalty & royal currency.