This article first appeared in Digital Edge, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on February 15, 2021 - February 21, 2021

If you grew up before the mid-1990s, you would have memories of running errands at a nearby sundry shop. More often than not, the store owner (whom you called “uncle”) would know who you and your parents were as well as the regular items on your shopping list.

It may seem like nothing, but the uncle would actually take the time to remember everything, from the family history to the regular purchases of the people who walked into his shop, cementing a relationship with them so they would keep coming back.

Much has changed since then. Today, the provision shop with the friendly uncle is almost a thing of the past and people wander through the aisles of impersonal department stores or shop online (especially in times like these), which is arguably a few degrees more impersonal. Gone is the human touch, the exchange of stories or even the friendly nod.

About five years ago, technologists, who realised that the growing impersonality was a bit of a problem, decided to put their heads together to see if they could replicate the personalised and unique customer experience available in the days of yore.

And this has resulted in hyperpersonalisation, which displays content, product and service information that is relevant to users.

Sourabh Agrawal, a partner at Entropia, a company that focuses on digital transformation, explains to Digital Edge that marketers, seeking more interactions, engagement and customer conversions, favour this strategy as it takes personalisation to the next level.

“For example, if you have an app installed for a retail fashion brand, you will get a push notification listing the products you would like to purchase on your phone when you visit the mall, in the proximity of the store. In this case, your real-time location data has been married to your demographic, the products that you browsed in the past and your response rate to push notifications,” he explains.

For Diwali last year, Mondelez India developed India’s first hyperpersonalised video advertisement for Cadbury Celebrations using geotagging and real-time location data. The advertisement leveraged AI to feature small and medium enterprises (SMEs) that were closest to the viewer based on specific pin codes (postcodes) in Mumbai, Delhi, Pune, Indore, Ahmedabad and Lucknow.

As a large part of India is made up of SMEs, this advertisement was developed to provide these businesses with exposure to help them survive the pandemic. The advertisement was developed by reaching out to more than 1,800 local retailers across more than 260 pin codes, whose businesses were promoted locally through the Cadbury Celebrations ad.

The aim of hyperpersonalisation, says Agrawal, is for customers to be treated as individuals. A study by cloud-based software company Salesforce shows that 98% of marketers agree that personalisation helps improve customer relationships, with 74% claiming it has a “strong” or “extreme” impact. However, only 22% of consumers are satisfied with the level of personalisation they receive from brands.

In fact, hyperpersonalisation is almost to be expected, if not taken for granted. Thanks to on-demand services such as Spotify and Netflix that have seamlessly integrated personalised features into their applications, many people have come to expect a more personalised user experience, not only from these services, but in general.

Spotify managing director for Asia-Pacific Gautam Talwar tells Digital Edge that users are matched with the content they want to hear at the right time and in the right place. To do so, the company spends a lot of time understanding how people listen to music and how to best fulfil their needs in the moment.

“Our tech research team fo­cuses on several areas such as human-computer interaction, language technologies, machine learning, algorithmic bias, evaluation, search and recommendation and user modelling,” he says.

“These technologies make personalisation and discovery work for both our artistes and listeners. Over 30% of the music being listened to on Spotify has been programmed by a combination of our algorithms and our editorial teams.

“Every day, we capture more than half a trillion ‘events’ from users interacting with music and podcasts on Spotify and our technology leverages these to power our recommendations. By continuously listening and learning people’s habits and interests, we are able to deliver an ever-evolving soundtrack for each user.”

As companies scale up, the personal touch tends to be forgotten and the messaging that goes out through all channels can be very generic, says C S Gill, country manager of Infobip Malaysia. But the simple act of noticing and remembering a customer’s journey on a website, for example, can go a long way.

“The journey doesn’t end after a customer makes a purchase. That’s just the start of the journey. After that, it’s about building a relationship with the customer so it sticks with them for life and gives them a reason to come back.” 

There is a lot of complexity that goes behind balancing the creative and technological aspects of a hyperpersonalised experience. Entropia’s Agrawal shares that these technology tools and platforms can be integrated natively if brands are using a single-stack solution like an Adobe marketing cloud, or through custom-built adapters using a customer data platform.

The number of technologies also varies, based on the channels you are looking at personalising, he adds. For instance, there are different tools for digital media channels, direct response, web experience and in-store.

“Technology is just an enabler and is going to be a commodity in the future. Everyone will have the same technology available at similar prices. The differentiation will be when brands pick the right insights to figure out which micro-barrier they want to address,” he says. 

“It’s about going back to finding that little nugget of insights and crafting the hyperpersonalisation nicely. [Our product] Roxy focuses a lot on the crafting aspect. Creative technologists are important as they think about the technology while having the ability to write copy and create art and visuals, which complement each other in this strategy.”

Brands are not just thinking about digital channels but offline channels too. Agrawal shares that an example of this was Coca-Cola’s “Share a Coke with a friend” campaign that saw bottles and cans of Coca-Cola being printed with people’s names. This was also seen in Malaysia as well.

“There are hyperpersonalised printers in the market to make each packaging different from another. It used to cost quite a lot but brands like HP have commoditised these printers.”

Gill explains that before this, people were trying to digitalise human work but now, they are trying to humanise technology. It used to be all about automation and digitisation but now it is coming back to humanisation. 

“[A brand’s] messaging has to be relevant and empathetic. I, a customer, don’t want to talk to a bot. If I’m talking to a bot, I just want to get to the point instead of clicking options. The next step of personalisation will be when companies find a way to make their customers feel as if they are not talking to machines, even if they are.”

Combining data with the human touch is a strategy used by Spotify, says Talwar, because creating a personalised playlist for an individual user within a market can be a challenge, especially across different cultural nuances and trends, among others. 

Some examples of Spotify’s personalised offerings include the “Discover Weekly Playlist”, which is different for each user. Updated every Monday morning, a custom-made playlist is curated for users based on their listening habits and remains one of Spotify’s most beloved personalised playlists since it was born in July 2015 at a Spotify Hack Week.

“Our team of global editors focuses on creating locally relevant playlists for our users, drawing on their expertise and cultural knowledge. Our algorithms then allow us to better tailor, programme and scale that curation for our global audience of more than 320 million listeners.”

Spotify’s search feature is also tailored to one’s tastes, Talwar adds, so users might notice that when they type the first letter or two of the name of an artiste they love, it may come up first — even if there is a more widely popular artiste with a similar name.

“This ensures that Spotify users are able to quickly access the right content at the right time for their individual needs, without taking a one-size-fits-all approach,” says Talwar. “We’re focused on building on the technology that makes Spotify a part of our users’ lives and you can expect us to continue innovating on that front. For example, we’re already testing ways to combine editorial and algorithmic recommendations — by taking an editorial playlist and narrowing it down to be personalised to the individual listener.” 

Hyperpersonalisation can be expensive. Is it worth it? Agrawal believes so. Entropia researched hyperpersonalisation strategies about 2½ years ago to test a hypothesis that if a brand personalised its communication or trigger points, more consumers will be driven to the brand. The core study showed that personalised creative campaigns were 16 times more effective than a normal one.

“So, for example, we calculated how many views a video got when it was generic versus when it was hyperpersonalised,” Agrawal explains.

“But from there, some brands want to probe deeper to see whether their product actually sells through these hyperpersonalised advertisements and that is where we found that the results do not necessarily reflect in sales as there are other factors that come into play beyond communication.

“For example, with automotives, we did a test with BMW and it showed that people still prefer to walk into showrooms to test-drive the car before buying.”

There are two types of hyperpersonalisation play for the SMEs, says Agrawal. One employs native advertising platforms such as Google Ads and Facebook Ads, which have moved to developing basic hyperpersonalised solutions within their stack. The other is for SMEs that are taking control of the distribution value chain by reaching out directly to consumers (e-commerce). 

Agrawal says with the accessibility to consumer data, brands have options to choose from software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based offerings like Entropia’s Roxy platform, which allows partners to sync different types of data points and create simple yet meaningful hyper-relevant advertisements.

However, the initial shock of the Covid-19 pandemic forced orga­nisations to adopt physical distancing, test their business continuity plan and rapidly deploy work-from-home models, all while customers rushed to digital channels. This urgent response has now given way to a pervasive uncertainty about what lies ahead, says Agrawal, but he is certain that hyperpersonalisation will continue to be the centre of customer experiences.

“In 2025, data from all customer interactions will be fed back into analytics to inform operations and product owners, not just for marketing, but also to help the company understand behaviour patterns and guide the organisation on what matters to each customer,” he says.

“In the next five years, more and more organisations will break the silos and data firewalls, and will achieve total consistency and transparency across channels, prioritising a seamless experience for the journeys that matter most to the customer.”

Infobip recently launched an omni­channel customer engagement hub called Moments to enable SMEs to create personalised interactions and build meaningful relationships with consumers.

Moments helps marketers and brands create campaigns that resonate with customers on a personal level by providing a holistic view of the customer and unifying popular communication applications onto a single platform, including chat apps (WhatsApp, Viber, Facebook Messenger, Line), SMS, email, voice, mobile apps, websites and emerging channels such as rich communication services.

“Moments is essentially an engagement solution that can provide great customer experience and works with brands throughout a customer’s journey from as early as onboarding, which is all data-driven,” says Gill.

“What that means is, let’s say a consumer logs on to a website and looks at a blue shirt but leaves without buying anything. This event will trigger a custom campaign just for the consumer, such as sending an email, SMS or WhatsApp with a voucher for that specific blue shirt.”

While it might seem futuristic, the height of hyperpersonalisation, says Gill, is when a fridge is smart enough to trigger grocery purchases based on what is in it. 

“For example, the fridge will realise that milk is running low and sends me a message on my phone asking me whether I would like milk delivered to my home and all I need to do is click on ‘yes’. 

“Hyperpersonalisation is here to stay and we can’t shy away from it simply because of the digital world that we live in. If brands don’t personalise our messaging and continue to just send generic emails and SMSes to their whole database, the brands will just drown in the mass of digital noise or, worse, be marked as a spammer. You have to know your customer.”

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