Thinking out loud - Relevance, personalisation, tailored?

Some random, un-edited thoughts I found the other day when asked by a Marketing Director whether we should be talking about Relevance or Personalisation

OK so relevance and personalisation or tailored are much used terms in terms in the industry so I think we need to use something a little different and perhaps lends itself to our core offerings.

I quite like the term unique experiences in particular as it plays to our content and experiences pillar but also that the delivery of unique is achieved through data

Of course one angle we could play with is the idea of using our three pillars and data to understand and widen windows of relevance .

Relevance is important of course but I would argue that targeting or personalising customers based on who they are is less important than than targeting them at moments when they are ready to do something

The fact that I am just about to take out home insurance is more important than if I am a 35 year old male living in Newcastle. If I am existing policy holder then you could argue that the window of relevance in terms of me renewing that policy gets bigger as we get closer to the point of renewal. We can use data to understand when the best time to is to start explicitly talking about renewing the policy ( our business rules might tell us that this starts 30 days before the renewal date). But that fact that they might have had an unsuccessful claim in the last 12 months might require a slightly different approach)

A mobile phone customer might very well have a 12 month contract with you but does the fact that after 4 months their call volumes drop significantly suggest that the time to have a conversation with them about their contract has been brought forward?

A TV and broadband customer who is just 15 days into a 24 month contract already has an outstanding customer service issue and has been their account to search how to cancel a contract might mean that the courtesy call planned for day 28 might need to be brought forward.

Of course we can talk about upsides as well. The TV and broadband customer seems to be watching a lot of sport..does a conversation about HD become relevant?

A couple of who bought one of our new build homes has a new baby . Does a conversation about a bigger home become relevant?

Relevancy is important, but recognising those windows of relevancy is crucial. Its data that allows us to do this

These windows shift in time, size and shape

Of course we could explore how a brand can make these windows bigger...how does an insurance firm use data and content to be relevant to a customer in between policy renewals? How does a company installing boilers use data so they can investigate the relevancy of other services in between the lifetime of the boilers they sell?