http://econsultancy.com/ca/blog/63545-behavioural-marketing-and-how-to-get-your-customers-to-love-you

In the blog post by Econsultancy, the author made a great case for improving the personalization of advertising and marketing in order for customers to be more familiar with a certain brand and therefore develop brand loyalty.

In addition to that, the author also gave an example where a customer is more likely to choose a specific shop out of many other shops due to the relationship established with the shopkeeper. I find that there are several problems with this metaphor.

Firstly, the metaphor completely ignores the main problems faced by personalized advertising. The customer decides to continue going to a certain store is because of the personal and human relationship established with the shopkeeper. In the relationship, dialogues can happen between the two and a mutual bond can occur. However, many personalized advertising just display to customers what they want, actively convincing them to buy, buy, buy without actually having an avenue for customers to relate back to the product or have a conversation with people who run the product. Therefore, the differentiation between the metaphor and what actually happens with personalized advertising falls on that front.

Secondly, the problem with personalized advertising is that there is no active and voluntary channel for a customer to explicitly tell what they prefer. In the metaphor, the customer can establish a great commercial relationship with the shopkeeper is mainly due to the fact that the customer consciously tell the shopkeeper what he likes and do not like. Unsimilarly, personalized advertising only gathers information without explicit permission or conscious participation from the customer, which means just a one way relationship. Such relationship of immense power and information that the advertiser has will bring a negative impact on the perception of the customer towards the advertiser, the so called ‘uncanny valley’ which something tries to resemble a human but is not perceived to be human, causing the interaction to be extremely uncomfortable.

Overall, it is important to balance between collecting information and creating a true personal relationship.