In the early part of the evolution of marketing as a discipline, there were a lot of theories and strategies. Almost none of them were backed by data. Today, in the age of big data, marketers have an ocean of information but are struggling with how to use it. They capture every interaction with their customers – the sale, the after-sales service, etc., and based on all this transactional information, they use predictive and lookalike models to forecast future behavior. All of this based on interactions with the brand. Pretty neat, right? Sounds simple and logical. But in all this simplicity, they almost always miss out on an important fact – what you don’t know about the customer can and will hurt your brand and business in the short and long run. There is a brand world and there is a customer world, and they don’t collide. They co-exist and inter-mingle. This is where intent-based marketing comes into play – understanding both sides for a more complete connection.
All of us have experienced on platforms like Flipkart, Amazon, MakeMyTrip, etc. that once you look at a product or offer they literally start trolling you. This in my mind is the crudest form of ‘intent’ marketing or trolling, if you please. One of my friends who had a back pain bought a massage oil on the advice of his yoga teacher, turns out that the oil was also a cellulite reducer and Amazon quickly concluded that he or his wife was pregnant and bombarded him with pregnancy related items! He certainly was not amused. His son is in the US and studying music, he travels three times a year to meet him, he loves different cuisines, loves performing arts, etc. and all this data is somewhere, he does almost all his searches online. But who will take the effort to understand him?
Currently, marketers look through a narrow prism of interaction with the brand. Though most of them talk about having moved to or striking a balance with ‘attention’ driven marketing to ‘context’ driven marketing, very few know how to move to intent-based marketing. The most successful marketers pick up signals, aka – intentions, and convert them into opportunities for their brand. Signals and intentions are a two-way street. The prospect/customer is going to look or is looking for something that will meet their needs/wants, and the brand is looking for them. Probably the most fertile meeting ground, right?
Marketers are discovering that life in the fast-changing digital world is not so easy. But the fact is that the customer is leaving behind a host of signals outside the marketer’s ring-fenced data ecosystem. This can be effectively used to place the brand in the right place, at the right time and in the right context and solve the right problem for the right customer…this certainly is the right intention, right? Customers start their journeys towards making choices much before brands come to know of them. Using a mix of data and intent driven marketing, marketers can narrow this chasm. In his book, Pull, David Siegel wrote – ‘In the world of pull, you don’t own the customer, the customer owns you, your company’s economics are aligned with your customers. Companies that focus on results for customers will set the pace.’
It’s time for markets to move from interruptive marketing to intention marketing. Let’s stop taking things at face value or rather ‘Facebook’ value. Targeted marketing is after all not so targeted. I can assure you that a lot of people are not what they claim to be or write on their facebook wall. Zuckerberg once said – ‘the days of having a different image for your work, friends or co-workers and for the other people you may know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly, having two identities for yourself is an example of lack of integrity’. However, he quickly added in the same breadth that the only ‘you’ that matters to facebook is the one it knows. Not the one you are!
How Can Marketers Leverage Intent-Based Marketing to Decode Customer Data?
Intelligent marketers are grappling with these issues – intent, context, content, conversation, and closure. Let’s stop stereotyping the customer and look beyond typical segmentation techniques. The fact of the matter is that there is no one data set that can ideally describe who we are and what we want. It will always be multi-layered. Going forward, to get to the real intent and address a genuine need for customers, marketers will have to marry First party (transaction data), Second party (partner data), and third-party data. There are many facets to data – structured, unstructured, dark data, unrelated data. All of this cohesively brought together will result in better signaling and a much more accurate expression of intent by customers. We already live in an ‘intention rich’ and ‘attention poor’ economy, and marketers will need to embrace intent-based marketing to navigate this paradigm shift.
How Marketers Can Embrace Intent-Based Marketing in the Intention Economy?
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Dealing with complexity: Look at ideas and signals across unrelated data points.
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Let facts and data points evolve strategy, not the other way around. If you have a ‘gut’ feeling or hypothesis, test it with data.
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Be nimble. Be willing to experiment and change course at a moment’s notice.
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Get intelligence-driven partners on board.
Surely, it's early days for the intention economy in India, but as the Danish mathematician Piet Heim said – ‘to err and err and err again, but less and less and less.’ Marketers will need to experiment and embrace intent-based marketing, betting on new platforms, techniques, and solutions. A combination of intelligence, data, technology, the ability to take risks, and their synthesis will drive the new customer era. And just so that I have the last word – Good intentions don’t last, but an intelligent approach and relentless execution do.
