Too Much Noise

I am an information junkie that reads just about anything I get my hands on – books, articles, blogs, advertisements, magazines, billboards, tweets and my most recent addition, food and ingredient labels. This may sound like a lot to absorb, but all of these things combined don’t even come close to how overwhelmed I feel when I wake up each morning and check my email inbox. I scroll through pages and pages of attention-grabbing subject lines like:

• “Don’t miss this exclusive sale!”
• “You’re going to LOVE this!”
• “We miss you <3”
• “Limited time only…”
• “Ring in the new year with X, Y and Z!”

When I see the flood of these unread emails, a brief panic goes through me and I immediately skim the subject lines and do a single group delete. Done. Immediate relief. If I’m looking for something in particular, I may peek at a couple of emails, but those usually get zapped too.

I know what you’re thinking, “You could just unsubscribe from those emails.” You’re right, I could. However, I’m not going to just in case there comes a time I will want those emails. 99% of the time I’ll probably delete them all, but for that measly 1% I’m going to endure the daily pain.

It’s stressful being a consumer.

Then I got to thinking, marketers need to know their audience better.

Seth Godin writes,

You can no longer market to the anonymous masses. They’re not anonymous and they’re not masses. You can only market to people who are willing participants.

So true. No one, especially nowadays, appreciates feeling like they’re being mass marketed to, and I get it – the idea of businesses knowing your buying patterns and interests is creepy. However,  whether we want to admit it or not, there is some level of expectation that businesses should have an inkling of what we want. It’s almost offensive to receive “recommendations” or “suggestions” from websites and businesses when they are way off and totally wrong. Right?

Take Netflix recommendations for example. When I first signed up as a member, over 6 years ago, I’d flip through a ton of random hodge podge selection of movies. Fast forward to today, and I love what gets recommended to me. Perhaps too much.

Data. Data. Data. It’s out there. And as marketers, we just need to be better about slicing, dicing and making sense of it all.