T2 cultural or individual?

 Now here is a right ‘individual’ : ‘Our Katie’

She is ‘one of a kind’. Here is a profile of her below if you want.

OK, so what sort of profile might I write for this photo…….?

Katy (Caitlin Rose). Retriever. White/Golden. Very original white wedding present. 10 x dog / 70 x human years old.  Pedigree as long as your arm (or longer). Half a neurone (if that) to her name, poor love. Heart always in the right place. Forever desperately trying to ‘do the right thing’ in any and every circumstance – just totally unsure and incapable of working out quite what that is. Permanently worried with a ‘far away’ or ‘lost’ look in her eyes and pink paws from nervously licking them. Runs away with legs turning like Meep-Meep in the Roadrunner cartoons from any unexpected noise or from ‘bags that have no right to be there’.  Think she must have had a bad experience with another family before she was re-homed with us at 8 months old.  Loves people but hasn’t tried to eat anybody whole yet!  Rounds us up like a sheepdog at home and hates it when her ‘sheep’ move from the places she has assigned them.  Has developed a ritual around her dog bowl: when it is dinner or breakfast time she will check that I am putting food in the bowls, walk out of the kitchen door and wait in the hall until she sees her bowl set down. Then she will make her ceremonial entrance, but will wait until someone sits down beside her before she starts to eat. 

Photogenic.  Runs like the wind. Hates running water (rivers etc) but adores plunging headlong into deep, dirty puddles and rolling to her heart’s content. Strangely, for one so weird, loves snow and the deeper the better: her favourite trick: bounding in 80cm snow drift, diving under and crawling like an oversized, crazy white Mole (a ‘taupe’) to surface somewhere else 20m away just to surprise you: we call it ‘snorkeling’.  Oddly, she does this whenever we are in Germany and it snows! Hates riding in the car – sits in the rear seat well, jamming herself between the seats. Does not support ‘dozyvet’ tablets (dog-calming and anti-nausea tablets)… even at half the recommended dose for her weight, she is totally spaced for two days at least… let her off the lead and she leans so much to one side she just goes round in one very small circle like a toy train on a track until she stops and leans against the car before she falls down!

——————————————————————————————————————————-

OK Enough about Katy!  The point is: she is unique and we are ALL unique.  In all human history there has never been another you (not even if you are a twin!).  So, from our discussions on T1, should we be aiming at statistical, average cultural identities and values or at individuals if we really want to market effectively to each and every person that might be receptive to our offer???

——————————————————————————————————————————

What do you think?

• Would any one of you here today claim to be ‘Mr or Mrs Average’ when it comes to your culture of origin?
• Are you ‘typically French’ /German/ Algerian/ Indonesian/ Chinese……) –
• Do I consider myself to be typically half-English/ Half Scottish and a typical representative of those brought up between Manchester and Liverpool???!!!

Hofstede [basics … national cultural differentiations] might well differentiate between cultures on the basis of a few [just 4 – 6]  simple criteria drawn from the average results from a large-sample, global survey, but surely that describes no individual fully enough to be able to get under his own ‘skin’ and offer him something truly personalised: individual.  Think about Amazon, for example – does it treat you as a typical, average French or German person, say, (other than in language terms) or does it treat you as YOU:- learning continually from your purchases, your on-site research, the contents of your wish-list, the things it offers you and you reject (or accept)?

In the pre-internet age we had a real problem with ‘Richness‘ and ‘Reach’ – the two were alternatives: you could have one or the other and not both (a real ‘Catch 22’ Joseph Heller):

• You could have richness (of message etc) – but it would be aimed at a very small target market
• You could have reach (large target market) – but there couldn’t be richness in the message – it had to be short, simple and standardised.

But new technologies changed all that: you can now ‘have your cake and eat it’ (you can have BOTH richness AND reach – at least to some degree – via internet, email, social networks etc.).

_________________________________________________________________________

[ASIDE. Talking of technologies changing things … Do you know the inter-cultural history of the invention and development of the HTML and HTTP code that enables the web to work on any device: your phone, laptop and PC for example?  Imagine if you had to pay 50 centimes from your account every time you clicked-on a link  —  you might have had to, you know, had one individual not decided to give his idea to the world for free (otherwise he would have been richer than the Queen, Warren Buffet, Carlos Slim, Steve Balmer, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates put together! …. please tell me you know who they all are!).  Do you know the story?  It has something to do with: France, Switzerland, Poole (where I used to live in England), my wife and life as a stagiaire …. and was invented and developed roughly 100km from Mulhouse…).  Right … tell me the who, where, when and why of this modern history that makes your online life possible!  …… Chapeau Bas to anyone who actually knows!….. ]

…OK… if you didn’t know – I hope you found that mini history lesson instructive!  Don’t worry if you didn’t – most generations are born with a historical ‘black hole‘ just behind them – because historians and writers (your parents’ age+) are writing school textbooks about ‘history’ as it appears to them – things that happened to their parents way before they or you were born or prior to this.  So in a sense it shouldn’t surprise you that you know more about Ancient Rome or Greece or than you do about the history of the last 50 years or more!  For you that is history.  For your parents and grandparents it was reality / ‘actualité’ rather than history.  [For me, born in 1958, at school in the 60s and 70s I had zero teaching about the post WW2 period – it all ended at Churchill and De Gaulle!]

_________________________________________________________________________

Let’s get back to the issue in hand, then…..

If Anna Pollock is right, what is the next big thing after inter-culturality and is it already here?

Perhaps I should add a post-script to our discussions here…. maybe inter-cultural marketing is just an ephemeral ‘half-way house’, a mid point between treating everyone everywhere in the same way with a standardised package or service and the ultimate personal, fully-tailored (‘bespoke’) version.  Is anyone here ‘Mr or Mrs Average‘ when it comes to your culture of origin? Hofstede might well differentiate between cultures on the basis of a few simple criteria (and others with rather more) drawn from the average results from a large-same survey, but surely that describes no individual fully enough to be able to get under his ‘skin’ and offer him something truly personalised.  Think about Amazon, for example – does it treat you as French or German, say, (other than in language terms) or does it treat you as YOU, learning from your purchases, your on-site research, the contents of your wish-list, the things it offers you and you reject (or accept).

In the pre-internet age we had a real problem with ‘Richness‘ and ‘Reach’ – you couldn’t have both: one or the other but not both.

• You could have richness (of message etc) – but it would be for a very small target
• You could have reach (get to a wide market) – but there couldn’t be richness in the message – it had to be standard and basic

But new technologies changed all that: you can now ‘have your cake and eat it’ (you can have BOTH). Some examples:

• loyalty cards track us and our individual purchases so that the stores can offer us personalised deals with a high propensity we will take them up [SuperU is currently trying to get me to shift from Ultima dog food to another brand, upon which I am sure, they generate a greater margin. Good idea in principle but poor in practice – they don’t know dogs or dog owners and what they like and why they choose and will not change for a few centimes].
• Amazon’s interface and algorithms ‘get to know you’ so Amazon can begin to ‘teach’ you what you will like so you will learn and ask for it. It even allows others to sell on its site so you never have to look elsewhere and you become a captive audience. [Imagine a board meeting where someone threw the idea of letting anyone sell on their platform at Jeff Bezos and his colleagues – they could just have easily said: « We’ve spent millions developing OUR platform – and you want us to let anyone – even our competitors –  freely use it!!  Are you crazy?!! »    …. But they didn’t!].  
• Spotify provides daily and weekly ‘albums’ constructed just for me based upon my listening, library and downloading. I am willing to bet no-one else in the world has the same constructed album track lists.  Why? Differentiation.  Personalisation. Stopping me from going to Deezer or other competitors. Persuading me to upgrade to ‘Premium’.
• Car manufacturers like BMW which in 2003/4 offer 50,000 different option permutations /personalisations (it took my Dad three whole days at the showroom to choose his Series 5 configuration and he was exhausted!).  Apparently it wasn’t just a Q of his age…. everyone baulks at the enormity of almost infinite choice: it is too time-consuming, too complicated, too detailed. Perhaps, although we have ‘infinite variety‘ [thank you Shakespeare – Antony and Cleopatra!], we are looking for a kind of ‘fit’ that is « Close Enough to Rock and Roll » rather than perfection because perfection costs too much in time and effort …..
• Search Engine Optimisation can help marketeers find and ‘hook’ those out there with particular demands expressed in search terms [this is more effective than targeting a cultural ‘average’ but it isn’t total full-on personalisation either – though it moves towards it on the continuum]

So here are the questions for you to think about

1. From your experience, can you add to the above list of products/services and position your example on the continuum: 100% standardisation for everybody –> significantly culturally adapted –> 100% personalisation (for exploded version – see below)

• 100% standardised
• highly standardised – very little cultural adaptation
• mostly culturally adapted / some standardisation
• wholly culturally adapted
• some limited individual tailoring (perhaps upon a culturally adapted base)
• mostly tailored to the individual
• totally tailored: 100% personalised/ individualised

2. Are the days of MICAI numbered?   Might we be entering a period where low-cost means total standardisation and luxury means the ultimate in personalisation … and the cultural average is ‘lost’ in the middle and squeezed out because the average really represents statistics not individuals?

3. Should we be looking more closely at personal choice and how we communicate it?  A good start here would be to listen to a 10 minute Ted Talk by Sheena Iyengar called: ‘How to Make Choosing Easier‘. It seems that the ultimate extreme of 100% personalisation forces too many complex choices upon us (as it did upon my Dad) and that the experience of choosing between infinite options is too complicated and frustrating and renders the process too lengthy and no longer enjoyable.  This is perhaps why, currently, Toyota seems to offer things within a framework which is easier to choose from: for the Rav 4:

• Two basic models (Hybrid or Petrol) and 2WD or 4WD;
• 6 basic external colours and finishes
• 6 basic internal styles/colours
• Appx 3 technology levels

__________________________________________________________________

So… is MICAI just the midpoint on the continuum en route for 100% personalisation or maybe constrained personalisation / dynamic packaging?

DISCUSS!

_________________________________________________________________________