By its nature, the marketing field is one big, competitive mess. Thousands of brands contending for the complete mind-share of an exponentially greater number of consumers claw, scratch, and fight for the attention of their target audience.

Survival of the Fittest

In many ways, marketers live in a very Darwinistic world. Indeed, the marketer’s world is defined by a fast-paced, highly competitive environment. All marketers are seemingly shoveling out messages, content, promotions and offers – anything to incentivize customers to buy. But few are doing so in a way that will allow their species (companies) to survive (sell more in comparison to their counterparts).

One of Darwin’s central-most theories dictates that environment plays a role in determining who lives and who doesn’t.

With the evolution of company culture, service or product offerings, growth, power, and wealth, it’s inevitable that bigger companies with more resources will often outlast others. We’ve witnessed this in every industry. Consider the major advertising holding companies of WPP, Omnicom Group, Publicis and Interpublic Group of Companies that continue to buy out smaller, but similarly-situated, companies. This is classic corporate America. It’s also an exhibition of the competitive dog-eat-dog marketplace from a corporate perspective.

The Link to Consumer Behavior

But let’s step back and consider how the theory of natural selection may play a role in what a consumer purchases and why.

Darwin’s Theory of Evolution holds that by the mechanism of natural selection, over time, small genetic mutations in certain species give that species a competitive advantage in the game of life. Disadvantageous traits eventually weed out inadequate or weaker species. The strong rise; the weak fall.

Today’s world of consumerism is quite similar. For our purposes, let’s consider the way customers serve as the mechanism – the equivalent to natural selection in Darwin’s world – by which some companies succeed and others do not (other factors are at play, too, of course). In general, people buy better products with better features, thus enriching their lives with a superior customer experience.

Not all products are alike. Not all companies are alike. And not all marketing is created equal. Going back to the idea of digital disruption, for a moment – marketing that is executed via the right channels, to the right people, at the right time will have the best combination of allure (a la DNA) to weed out the competition and rise to the top, to capture attention and entice purchase.

Darwin’s Lessons for Marketers

This is true in every industry. We can learn two main lessons from Darwin, then, in today’s modern marketing landscape:

• Minor, but functionally significant, differentiations in products and marketing are the genetic mutations that will propel a brand forward. In a completely commoditized world, almost every product serves some kind of purpose in customers’ lives. The true difference will be how niche one product is compared to another, and how it fits to serve a small purpose in a consumer’s life better than other products. The best marketing will convey that benefit.
• Customers are in charge. Adopting a customer-centric mentality is critical in today’s world. This means recognizing that your customers control your brand. Your customers aren’t truly yours unless you’ve fully converted them to loyal buyers. They’re constantly seeking the best product or service that fits their lives – it doesn’t necessarily matter where it comes from. Strong brands succeed; weak brands fall.

Okay, so we’re not living in the 19^th Century and analyzing animals of the avian variety in the Galápagos Islands. But the insights that Darwin derived from his studies are truly timeless, and offer some valuable perspectives when connecting with customers and growing our businesses.

Driving revenue and change doesn’t necessarily mean changing the world. It means delivering a superior product that fills a small part of your customer’s lives – in a way that no one else can. It means catching the moment at the exact right time and weeding out the competition.

It’s do or die time.

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It’s clear that marketers need to find a surefire way to compete with and beat other marketers, knife through the noisy marketplace and understand their customers to find success. But what if they stopped guessing at what worked and what didn’t?

Using Big Data To Earn Customer Loyalty

Marketers, advertisers, customer relationship management professionals – here’s a question for you: What would you do if you knew you could use individualized insights driven by data combined with an understanding of your customer’s cognitive processes and their very personal daily routine (i.e. their habits) to engage them like never before?

First, consider this: according to the 2015 Teradata Data-Driven Marketing Survey: Progressing Toward True Individualization, “How can we better acquire and retain customers?” is the most challenging question selected by the largest percentage – 38 percent – of marketing executives. Both large and small enterprises are transitioning to using data to drive marketing insights and prove ROI if they’re not already investing in an automated marketing solution. Using data to gain individualized insights is the way of the future.

I think the most important lesson I learned from the renowned father of advertising David Ogilvy was that emotional, simple content will outperform cluttered copy and the hard sell more times than not. In this digital age of disruption, that philosophy, of course, can and should be amplified with relevant content placement, real-time offers and carefully planned promotions. But how does using big data connect to earning customer loyalty?

It’s about discovering individualized insights enabled by a data-driven marketing strategy that will provide the engine needed to power your marketing. Couple that with the surprising cerebral processes of habit, and you will be better prepared to communicate via marketing that works and drives customer engagement – and revenue growth.

The Power Of Habit

Good marketing means having the right kind of message – the right content, with a solid CTA and relevant placement. Great marketing means driving customer communications in real-time, catching customers at the exact moment they’re making a purchase decision and understanding exactly what they need, when, where, and how.

As Charles Duhigg discusses in his book The Power of Habit, and as documented by NPR (carve out some time to check this out if you haven’t; it’s quite telling), processes subconsciously occur within our brains that guide the way we live our lives and complete daily tasks.

First, a cue or trigger makes us want or need something, and it fires the neurons in the brain to take action to accomplish that thing, whatever it is. Once we figure out what we need, the routine or the behavior itself kicks in. Lastly, a reward is had, and this helps to reassure us that by following this process in the future, we’ll get the same result.

Marketers can learn from the science of pattern recognition and then create compelling, emotionally- resonating messaging that satisfies customers. Decisions made in the prefrontal cortex are usually subconscious and based on previous exposure to an advertisement or some sort of content. Marketers can use this surprisingly simple, yet typically unconsidered, information when crafting marketing messages and executing them with a data-driven solution.

This also means that even if a potential customer doesn’t act on a message the first time they see it, it isn’t a wasted effort. Given today’s modern marketing capabilities of retargeting and real-time interaction, marketers can retell their story to customers with individualized and relevant offers. They can use technology to understand where customers are in the buying cycle – awareness, consideration or purchase – and then provide contextual content to accommodate that stage.

Using Individualized Insights To Redefine Marketing

Let’s consider a real-life example of how one major consumer goods manufacturer used the concept of habit to redefine its product marketing.

By reevaluating its customer’s habits, marketers determined that the reason consumers purchased a brand of air freshener was not because of its ingredients or the way the can was presented on the shelf. In conducting further consumer research and working with product engineers, marketers realized that people bought the product chiefly for the refreshing and clean smell it offered when the rest of their dwelling looked nice. They understood that the product stood for more than fresh air—it enabled the customer to make a fresh home, to feel enriched.

In examining habits of its consumers, this brand understood the trigger to purchase was the intuitive need to cleanse and freshen one’s home. The behavior, then, was to somehow clean. Once marketers determined it wasn’t about packaging, the brand could refocus its message throughout all content, then execute in its outbound, omni-channel marketing approach.

By combining an understanding of the kind of messaging that customers needed to hear with a data-driven marketing solution, this product’s sales trajectory was completely reversed. Marketers tweaked how they talked about product features to appeal to customers in a different way, and it worked.

Let’s look at another retail example to understand the power of using data and purchase habits in marketing. If we know our customers individually by evaluating the data they provide, then we can anticipate what they want – that reward they seek – when shopping in a retail store.

Through the power of geolocation technologies like iBeacons, it is possible to know that Ben is at your store in the sporting goods section – and his customer data shows that he has recently researched information online for metal cleats. You can anticipate the reward he is seeking. Knowing he wants a pair of cheaper cleats and prefers a certain brand, you can automatically send offers through his mobile device.

Amidst the immense data-driven marketing capabilities and technological growth we’re seeing, the human element of habit will forever play an integral part in how we market. When an automated, individualized marketing approach driven by data is matched with an understanding of why we do what we do (i.e. our habits) marketers can catch the moment with customers and better enable their companies to drive revenue. Driving revenue – now that’s something you want to get in the habit of, yes?

The post Using Big Data To Learn Consumer Habits appeared first on Relevance.

Thanks, eBay, for being the engine of online shopping that you are, keeping me from getting to sleep at a reasonable time tonight. Someone, something, I figured, has to be behind the curtain. And something surely is.

If it feels like e-commerce websites like eBay know you so well, that they seem to know exactly what you want, when you want it—almost biogenetically engineered to serve your every online shopping need—it’s because they’re built to do just that.

eBay’s “Customer DNA,” the company’s central data repository and customer relationship management (CRM) center, was engineered with one specific goal in mind—to provide more personal and relevant outbound marketing. That was the topic that Patrick Hildebrand, Director, eBay, and Sridhar Paidi, Sr. Product Manager, eBay, recently discussed at the Teradata 2014 Partners Conference & Expo in Nashville back in 2014.

The eBay Effect: Data Galore

eBay brings in yearly revenue upwards of $18 billion and employs more than 33,500 people globally. It is, without question, “e-normous”. In its beginning stages, eBay was actually known as an online auction site. But it’s evolved since that perception was established, back at the height of the Internet boom.

Now, most people recognize the brand as a place you can buy virtually anything, including a $400,000 plane…Woah. In fact, 80 percent of items sold are new products. It’s clear that eBay has capitalized big time on its e-commerce strategy. And how it did so is pretty fascinating.

More stats, first:

• Each day, eBay generates 50 terabytes of new behavioral/transactional data
• Every five minutes, a car or truck is bought via the mobile app in the U.S.
• Every 12 seconds, a women’s handbag is bought via the mobile app in the U.S.
• There have been 260 million downloads of eBay’s mobile app

Armed with what seems like almost too much data, eBay was tasked with understanding said data to gain individualized insights about its customers and their buying habits, characteristics, likes and preferences.

Also Read: Why kissing frogs is soooo important … A cliché revisited

Though data was available, eBay was challenged to break down their data, dispersed by business units and across the data warehouse. It wasn’t long before a team of data scientists was introduced to focus strictly on customer data. Soon, it became clear that these data scientists were spending a lot of time just trying to find data, understand it and clean it before any actionable insights could be had. Mending this divide between IT’s capabilities and marketing’s goals (to use data and analytics to optimize every interaction with every customer) was in need of refinement.

Customer DNA

Enter “Customer DNA,”a single customer repository enabled by Teradata’s Enterprise Data Warehouse, the central system that collects all data. This allows for ultra-segmenting and targeting based on high value, medium value and low-value information.

Now, insights to drive business decisions and set strategy were able to be had. For example, eBay discovered that auction users—i.e. users who opted to “Bid” instead of “Buy It Now”—are more loyal than non-auction users.

It became clear that by cross-checking previously disparate data sets, new insights would follow. Results thus far have been staggering. Insights and models built from Customer DNA resulted in incremental sales in the first half of 2014.

“Customer DNA is becoming the backbone for eBay.” – Patrick Hildebrand, Director, eBay ß Text box

With enhanced data-driven marketing capabilities, eBay focused primarily on making its email marketing super-individualized and relevant. For example, “Daily Deals” were set up for select users—new deals based on search history sent every day. Pre-Customer DNA, these daily deals weren’t relevant or personalized. Now, reminders on “hot items” are sent to users, updating them on items they’re watching and the available inventory.

Emails tell recipients things like, “127 people watched this hot item in the last week. Only 8 left in stock!” They proved to be effective in generating more conversions than a traditional sale with no deadline to buy.

“Trending items” show which keywords are being searched the most, so if a customer has a high propensity in the category, they’ll get an email about the trending topic. First-time buyers also receive an email encouraging them to get involved in more than buying—selling (eBay has found that sellers are their most engaged customers).

Continuous Improvement

Is it perfect? No. I’ll sometimes receive an email for a product similar to what I like, but not exactly. For example, I search for a lot of basketball gear on eBay. However, this offer was irrelevant, as I don’t even know where my PS3 is:

And this one…as a guy looking for menswear, I’m unlikely to click on this:

But when it’s done right, striking the perfect balance of context and relevancy, made just for you – boy, it’s hard not to click:

Even if it’s a little bit off, they’re using insights they’ve accurately collected about me to send me offers around stuff I love. eBay must constantly innovate and seek ways to accommodate its more than 150 million active buyers. They do this with an easy-to-use interface, quality protection and sales monitoring, safe transactional purchasing, customer service and – most importantly for me – relevant offers, discounts, and suggestions.

The Future of Online Shopping

I must confess, I do possess the ability to X-out at any time, of course, and eventually do. But there is always more; always a good offer on the sidebar. Before I know it, I have 23 tabs open, all showing items I might like, all with “similar items” that are also tempting my click.

As I look up, after those two-hour long browsing sessions on eBay, I realize something. I realize that the road I took had a few pit stops (and many tabs open on my desktop), but that this was a really good thing – chances are astronomically good that I found what I was looking for plus more due to the high level of relevancy and contextual offering that eBay has so beautifully mastered.

I realize that more and more customers like me are moving toward online shopping and that using technological capabilities and individualized insights is drastically transforming how brands are able to connect with the always-on customer. No longer do I run from store to store looking for my favorite pair of sneakers or that hat I need. It’s all at my fingertips.

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