Skip to main content

The Internet of Things and the Segment of One

The Internet of Things (IoT) is inspiring some new (and some not so new) lines of marketing speak.
Notable is Segment of One.
What does that mean?
Simply, knowing vast amounts about your spending patterns, marketing effort is so tightly targeted on your needs, aspirations and requirements, it’s like a homing pigeon bullet, straight to the heart of your wallet.
So, I am talking to you, Segment of One!
Where can this kind of use of big data go wrong?
Once again, simply, in the delivery!
Personal Story
As a child growing up I lived in the seaside village of Muizenberg. Everybody knew everybody, we went to the same schools, shopped at the same stores, sat on the beach over the weekend, and if you didn’t know somebody, there was always a connection.  It was literally one degree of separation.
If I popped into Raad’s, the local greengrocer, he would greet me warmly, and send me home with a watermelon that was just the kind my dad liked.
At the pharmacy, they would give me my mom’s meds without needing an ID, and at CNA, they kept all my favourite magazines for me, without having to ask what they were, or whether they should.
Every shopkeeper asked about my sister and brother, knew where I lived, where I went to school, and later, where I worked, and not in a scary way…
It was the personal touch.   A natural segment of one.
Move forward to 2015
We know more and more about the things people want, and less and less about how to make the experience of buying pleasurable.
I shop at a small centre, and frequent 3 shops regularly.  In fact, I rarely go into the greengrocer without first visiting a national supermarket.   While the staff at the supermarket greet me, I am a complete stranger to them.  The lady (Gill) at the greengrocer knows my name as well as my major purchases, and gives advice.
The segment needs to feel special
You can slice and dice, target, spend time with focus groups, understand your market to the most microcosmic level, but if your delivery people are disengaged from the process, the impact is the same as if the raw data had never been analysed into business intelligence.
The risks of putting people into boxes because of their demographics
For example, a few childless (not by choice) couples have shared how they are constantly sent marketing material around education and fabulous toys because they fit the age demographic. 
Another regular scatter gun marketing is to senior exec women that frequently get offered special opportunities to become a better receptionist or secretary.
Utilising tighter segmentation should definitely improve both of the above.
The impact of larger and larger businesses
As you get bigger, you just get further and further from your clients and your staff, so segmenting and business intelligence make more and more sense.
But we all need to remember that the Internet of Things is to help us deliver better service and solutions to the Internet of People.  
When we forget that there are people at the end of the chain, and the processes we are following become more critical than the person we are providing a service to, when Things are more important than People, that is the slippery slope to business shortevity.

Links, References and Notes

Note on the word “shortevity” – I made it up!
 Note
 Thank you for reading Teryl@Work.   Should you wish to use any of the material, please acknowledge this blog as the source.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Its all about the numbers - retirement age

Weight, height, age, dress size, shoe size, all numbers that we (and the media) use to define people. I was fascinated by an article from the Leicester Mercury where the age of each witness to a bus crash in January were carefully listed. Sue Kellett, 56, whose front garden is bordered by the wall, was one of the first at the scene. Read more: http://www.leicestermercury.co.uk/Bus-driver-airlifted-hospital-collision-tractor/story-20512289-detail/story.html#ixzz31lXUuyZg Read more at http://www.leicestermercury.co.uk/Bus-driver-airlifted-hospital-collision-tractor/story-20512289-detail/story.html#9cHShVptF30lJw4X.99 Sue Kellett, 56, whose front garden is bordered by the wall, was one of the first at the scene. Read more: http://www.leicestermercury.co.uk/Bus-driver-airlifted-hospital-collision-tractor/story-20512289-detail/story.html#ixzz31lXUuyZg Read more at http://www.leicestermercury.co.uk/Bus-driver-airlifted-hospital-collision-tractor/story-20512289-detail/story.htm...
Post a Comment
Read more

Is the employee toxic or simply disengaged?

Is the employee toxic or simply disengaged?  And how to tell? Dissecting Employee Behaviour We spend hours of management time dissecting employee behaviour to ensure that not only is each employee delivering to a minimum expectation, he or she is not actively undermining the effectiveness of the business. We design KPAs (or KPIs, or whatever we want to call them), we run regular appraisals, we discuss career paths and succession plans, and  as long as toxic employees are delivering on their job description, we keep them! It’s only after they leave, when you hear the collective deep breath of relief from colleagues and management, that you can be absolutely sure of the negative impact. Underperformance vs Undermining My view has changed – rather an underperformer, than an underminer. So what to do? Once you have firmly established that undermining is the problem, the first step is to tell them that you are onto them! Never an easy task, because very few p...
Post a Comment
Read more

Feeding the Right Wolf

Feeding the Right Wolf This Cherokee story resonated with me (see below).     Like many business people, I get caught up in managing details, instead of focusing on strategy and growth.   Measuring myself against the Good Wolf concept has become a way of thinking for me. Feeding the good wolf - focusing on the right stuff! In a previous article on this topic, I commented that the message is simple, the wolf you feed is the one that grows. The good wolf attributes in a business are where we ideally should spend our time, that good old 80 – 20 rule focusing on our   engaged employees, improving client experience and quality of product,   to name a few. Creating a Good Wolf Environment While we have many different tools – appraisals, customer and employee surveys – to try and understand the temperature and levels of entropy in our businesses – the truth is that it is really difficult to explain to people that they are not seen as feeding the good wo...
Post a Comment
Read more