You are an amazing person. You are so special your own name is actually on everyday household products.
You are incredibly important to me. You’re so important to me that I have taken the trouble to put your name on a gift I am giving you.
Personalisation is an amazingly powerful proposition. No wonder it has become a huge trend this year.
The pulling power of personalisation in marketing
Notonthehighstreet.com has been doing personalisation for years, but it wasn’t until Coca Cola started its #ShareaCoke campaign last year that brand owners really woke up to the power of personalised marketing.
Now, in the UK, Marmite and Nutella have just launched personalised labels and the whole thing has gone nuts (sorry, it just had to be done.)
What’s interesting from a marketing perspective is how the different brands are applying personalisation in the market place, and the lessons we can learn from them.
The way Coca Cola has made its personalisation work for the brand is the stuff of legend, and the best place to read the detail is on its own website http://www.coca-cola.co.uk/stories/history/advertising/share-a-coke/
Here are highlights from “Share a Coke 2014 by numbers”
- Over a thousand names on our bottles
- 998 million impressions on Twitter
- 235,000 tweets from 111,000 fans using the #ShareaCoke hashtag
- More than 150 million personalised bottles sold
- Over 730,000 glass bottles personalised via the e-commerce store
- 17,000 virtual name bottles shared online across Europe
- 65 experiential stops on the Share a Coke tour
Building sales
The end game of any marketing campaign is sales. Building awareness, personality, relationships, engagement, reputation – all are steps on the road to sales.
My favourite two ‘killer stats’ about this journey are from MoneySupermarket.com:
- 24% I am more likely to buy from a company after ‘Liking’ them on Facebook.
- 32% I am more likely to buy from a company after following them on Facebook.
How do these statistics have a bearing on personalisation? Well with Marmite, to get your personalised jar you have to go to Facebook and buy a jar there, which is sent to you.
To get your Nutella label you have to go to a shop, buy a jar of Nutella, get hold of a code on the label, enter the code online, wait for the label to arrive in the post, and then stick it on the jar you bought earlier.
I researched both these routes on Google, and I found out about the concept by seeing a post in my Facebook timeline about Nutella and thought “hmm, I wonder if Marmite do that too…” I’ve bought my personalised jar of marmite already, and I’ll buy a jar of Nutella at lunch, if they have it in my local supermarket.
Understanding the customer journey
I have just described my simple-to-follow customer journey – it’s easy to see the touch points and communication channels involved.
So here are five tops to summarise the learning:
Five top tips to take away
- There is hashtag heaven and hell. Heaven is #LoveItHateItNameIt. Hell is #Suesanalbumparty. Find the right hashtag for your campaign, it will work wonders for you.
- Make your campaign true to your brand identity and to your overall campaign. Like #ShareaCoke and the story of sharing the love around, it gives a warm, fuzzy feeling evoking those vintage coke ad campaigns.
- Make every single one of your customer touch points work together: Facebook, Twitter, point of sales – the sum really is bigger than the parts.
- Decide on your objective before finalising your mechanic – are you trying to woo merchandisers and secure shelf space and customers in store? Or do you want online sales and customer database building?
- And saving the most important point for last: would people like a personalised version of what you sell? Could you even get a name on there?
December 2015
