The personalized customer experiences that the so-called “walled gardens” enable can be a lesson to brands and agencies to deliver and operate a truly customer-obsessed business model. The key to this success? Identity mapping. And not only to connect the dots across screens but also to gain a richer understanding of the needs, desires and actions of customers and prospects. This kind of people-based marketing can take place anywhere, not just within the garden walls.
We recently spoke with 4INFO CEO Tim Jenkins about how brands can implement identity mapping to quickly change their competitive trajectory and drive customer relationships at scale, the subject of a recent e-book the company published.
Check out the full text of the new 4INFO report “Mastering Identity Mapping of the Connected Consumer.” (Hint: You Are What You Eat. And Think. And Buy. And Do.)
Why are identity solutions needed now?
Jenkins: There are really three underlying seismic shifts in consumer behavior that are driving this need.
First is the undeniable reality that, today, consumers have more ways and places to transact and communicate with brands than ever before.
The second shift is that media consumption has become highly fragmented, with people consuming more content digitally and across a growing multitude of screens. Differing and incompatible technologies and methods make it nearly impossible to accurately recognize the same person across screens and achieve unduplicated reach.
The third change is how today’s consumers show little brand loyalty and demand that everything be delivered to them in a personalized fashion.
Is this why everyone is talking about people-based marketing?
Jenkins: The term “people-based marketing” is certainly not a new one, but is now used in contrast to targeting ads to devices or cookies, which is fraught with problems.
In recent years, people-based marketing has evolved to also include the ability to market to each person based on who they are, how they think and what they buy. And you accomplish this by taking all the various interactions and digital IDs and resolve them to a single person—or what Forrester Research has coined as “Identity Resolution.”
Regardless of what we call these methods, the goal remains to truly understand how your customers think, spend and act.
Is it as simple as collecting the right data?
Jenkins: Even if we are able to gather all of the data we collect across all of the touchpoints we have with customers, we still only have insight from our own interactions and transactions with those customers.
That’s where identity mapping becomes the key. If you are able to identify your customers as people—not just devices—and create a persistent identifier for them and all of the data you have, that’s the start. But when you are able to use this persistent identifier to map your customers to second and third-party data, you create a much more vivid, actionable picture of your customers that will empower you to do one-to-one, people-based marketing in ways that simply haven’t been possible before.
So why are brands challenged to put this in place?
Jenkins: As a brand you want to reach your customer everywhere—on their devices, in-store, at events, while traveling, with their friends, alone, in their homes, out in the world. But if you’ve been in digital marketing for any time, you know how hard this can actually be.
The good news is once you are able to combine the identifiers into a single person and you have a persistent ID for that person, advances in cross-screen technology have made it easier to reach that person across all of their mobile devices, desktop and laptop computers and connected devices such as addressable TV, and deliver personalized, relevant messages.
With the addition of insights gleaned from the digital exhaust of people’s mobile devices, you can combine real-world location data to understand where a person goes. This provides valuable insight into their interests and activities. Location data can also help you customize messages in the context of where people are at the moment and what they are doing, which enables you to deliver more relevant messages.
Find out more about “Mastering Identity Mapping of the Connected Consumer” here:
