Using Personalisation for User Value

Do you want to feel important?

Of course you do. If you feel important you feel valued. And if you are valued you feel safe

But the current global population is 7.5 billion and rising. It’s hard to feel important -and valuable- when there are so many of us. Instagram, Snapchat and other social media platforms help, but are they enough?

In marketing, they even have a term for it “the personal touch”- according to the Cambridge online dictionary — “an original or special quality, or something that is done for every single person in a group in order to make them feel special”

But the current global population of Internet users is around 3 billion and rising. Internet access gives us and the ability to access, collect and store more data than ever before. We can construct surveys, track browsing behaviours and build up terabytes and petabytes of data about actual and potential prospects, customers, service users. We can use data science techniques to model behaviour on the basis of this data. You would think that in a population of 7.5 billion, there would be some common characteristics, wouldn’t you? I mean, we are all human, after all.

But. just think for a moment. What does it mean to be valued?

The term “value” and related terms such as “values” and “valuable” are both familiar and strange. They are familiar because the term is widely used in our daily language. And they are strange because few people truly understand or share a fundamental -common)-meaning for the term.

Some years ago, I was running a workshop for senior C- level managers in the telecommunications industry who said that the primary focus of their organisations was the creation of value.

I asked them to take a few minutes to come up with a joint definition of that goal. After around ten minutes, their definition was “feeling good”.

Given that this was a workshop on deriving performance metrics and their role in strategy, this was less than useful. Of course, “being useful” is itself an obvious value concept, as is the judgment “good and bad”. These are among our more loosely defined concepts, and are deployed in the most diverse of situations.

But just because they are loosely defined doesn’t mean that we don’t defend- and attack — them fiercely.

In the 1950’s values came to be seen as something that makes up- or is integrated closely with — the personality. Attacks on a person’s ‘values’ are seen — in conflict theory and life — as similar to attacks on the person themselves.

Common sense would tell us that such polysemic terms — terms with multiple meanings — must, of themselves, pertain to subjective experiences. Value could, for instance, describe feelings, which have primacy in human information processing because of their immediacy, transience and relative power.

Feeling afraid is much more potent than thinking you might be afraid or analysing fear in someone else. And fear — or love, or knowledge or any other complex construct that we can think or feel- is personal. Although people talk about “being in love” as being quantitively different to “loving someone”, you can rest assured that the quantitative scales, intervals and concept maps will be different in every case.

This is because value is personal. And the reason value is personal is because the experiences that we base it on are personal too. All your primary experiences- the ones that underpin your values — were personal.

So, that is why we rely on personal interaction to define value. Impersonal doesn’t work. People don’t like information that isn’t connected to a person. And that is maybe why Data Science — ultimately- won’t work. And why influencers do.

But this is more than a decision about trust, it is a decision about how valuable customers need to feel in a world where personal interaction is algorithmic and were product and service delivery is still Fordist and getting more so.

It’s hard to feel important in a world of 7.5 billion others. But we need to help users do precisely that in order to succeed.

And unless we get value personalization right we won’t create the value that we need to grow our industries in sustainable ways.