Personalization Pros Spring 2019 Meeting

The Consortium of Personalization Professionals (CPP) is a unique group of expert practitioners and thought leaders focused on moving the state of practice forward. The group met at the Valtech offices in Toronto to discuss the latest developments in the field and to have much needed cross-discussion about creative strategies, profiling methodologies, operational models, ways of evaluating success, and other aspects of evolving practice.

We discussed a common approach to implicit personalization, in which you build personalization rules to deliver the content you want that personae to be seeing/you anticipate they want to see. A typical approach is:

• Meet with client and ask them who they think visits the website/ who they are trying to reach
• Develop robust personae models for a platonic idea of each of these audiences/user types
• Working with some data and a lot of “stakeholder discussions,” build a user journey – a personae in time
• Define desired outcomes for each user journey and tie these to personalization rules
• Instrument the site so that you can classify individuals as a given type of customer/profile/personae based on what you believe/guess/assume will interest a given personae

There are some problems with this approach, including:

• The client doesn’t really know who is visiting their website
• Stakeholders are basically guessing at the path users take to purchase
• We don’t really know what will interest a given personae (assuming they exist); we use best guesses. And if this definition is wrong, the profile measures something other than the personae you want
• In B2B scenarios, personae usually reflect industry vertical + title or job function + seniority, rather than demographic, technographic considerations
• Linkedin can help us solve some of the assumptions defined above