Segment-of-One: Is the Complexity Out of Control?

A bit over 30 years ago, I published an early manifesto about the need to take Segment-of-One Marketing seriously. It was before the Internet, before smartphones, and just at the start of when advanced analytics were getting applied to consumer data. Yes, it does make me feel old. But while the examples from the article are now dated, the core precepts seem to be holding true. Marketing capabilities increasingly drive advantage. Great insights, creative ideas, and strategies are all crucial, but the long game depends on building the right marketing operations foundation to manage all of the data, execution, and translation of strategy down to the individual level. 

Since then, if there is a common thread in technology, and especially marketing tech trends, it is that accelerated march towards a segment-of-one world -- serving everyone, on their own personalized terms, at the right context in their decision journey, immediately, while getting better as you build more data from every interaction.  In an effort to keep up with the consumer, competitive, and financial demands of making this happen, Marketers have built up their tech arsenals, hired new types of creative and design experts, and expanded their analytics teams. 

But the race is far from over, and the cost of complexity from more data, more media possibilities, more personalized creative, and more technology layers, is relentlessly countering the promised lift from it all. And is it even possible to find and pay for all the added talent one needs? 

In the face of all this complexity, Marketing organizations are becoming more siloed, with focused specialists in a wide range of ever-narrowing disciplines.  From a talent perspective, it is just not sustainable to have career tracks so focused.  Instead, we need to find a way to get back to nurturing broader athletes who can be marketing generalists.

With marketing plans that have dozens of media choices, dozens of selected targets, dozens of creative variations, and multiple sequencing options, we are resorting more to offshoring to lower the cost of resourcing needed to create and stay on top of such complexity, while risking the loss of creative innovation and diluting the essence of our brands. 

Meanwhile, the pressure from above for proven results before investing in more marketing makes growth a Catch 22 when you can’t invest more to prove you can invest more.

In discussions with many CMO peers over the last year, before Covid (and now it is probably even more urgent), most cite a need for us all to step back and rethink Marketing Operations.  Break the cycle of chasing the upside of complexity by adding more complexity. Instead, let’s aim to simplify our organizations and get the right balance back of breakthrough brand, innovation, and creative thinking with sharp, transparent analytics and efficient, fast operations. The speed with which everyone had to mobilize during the last eight months of the pandemic put a strong spotlight on the criticality of marketing operations. Once we get some breathing room though, we need to get more deliberate and not just reactive in setting up our processes. 

As I now step out from my recent CMO role and begin learning about the next generation ecosystem of marketing technologies and services becoming available, it is clear to me that the next rounds of breakthroughs will happen through Artificial Intelligence that optimizes for the left brain, together with copywriting, design, and delivery personalization that scales the right brain. And then bringing both into marketing organizations built for agile, iterative modes of operating through non-stop testing and learning.

This introduction launches a series of articles that will focus on how AI and creative personalization will drive the next generation of marketing transformation, focusing on a range of companies I have admittedly gotten close to through advisory work. I am very aware that AI is all over the tech world, and tooting the horn of AI breakthroughs will just add to the noise. But my take is different: let’s look at these companies not just for their own capabilities, but also for the implications they have for marketing strategy, organization, and process. While I will focus on specific companies in each article, see them as a window into the broader potential of similar capabilities becoming more widespread. 

I’ll be publishing these every two weeks or so, and they are first appearing in Mediapost. I look forward to your reactions and the inevitable debates this will spark.