From Coke cans to shoes to menus: what’s behind the rise in personalised products?

• In a world where carbon copies of products are everywhere, retailers have to make their products stand out and provide customers with a unique purchasing experience.
• The need to be different is even greater at a time consumers are being careful about what they spend.

How businesses learn what consumers want

• Similarly, entertainment streaming platforms Netflix and Spotify analyse their users’ viewing and listening history to understand their preferences and recommend new content.
• Coke’s Share-a-Coke campaign, unveiled in Australia in 2011, was a successful example of the bond brands can create with consumers just by adding a person’s name to the product.
• The company branded its bottles and cans with the 150 most popular names in Australia and urged consumers to share a Coke with someone whose name adorned the label.

Nike produces custom shoes in thousands of styles, colours and icon combinations as they continue to acquire data integration platforms that help speed up the collection and analysis of consumer data.

Consumers want more from their shopping experience

• It often resulted in personalised store interactions between salespeople and VIP customers, or tailoring store services.
• But the digital age has made personalisation accessible to all consumers, not just the high end.
• This feeling of psychological ownership results from designing your “own” product and can lead to greater value and brand love.

Why personalisation works for the big brands

• Personalising experiences, when offered to millions of customers, make it difficult for competitors to imitate, especially when brands use proprietary technology.
• Personalisation also means less waste as brands produce what consumers actually want rather than what they think consumers want.

However, using predictive algorithms to help brands analyse past behaviours (what you and others like you have bought/watched) and come up with choices (at scale) can be imperfect. Dating app Tinder’s reliance on algorithms to decide which photos users see has been criticised as flawed with very low reciprocal interest rates between users “swiping right”. Understanding human behaviour requires intuition alongside algorithms.

If personalisation isn’t new, then why the sudden hype?

• The digital revolution brought an influx of consumer data, but despite early algorithms, it was difficult for companies to make sense of large amounts of raw data.
• Big brands like Nike and L’Oreal have the right formula for personalisation and their customers are enjoying a unique experience.

Marian Makkar does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.