Intent to Buy Cartoon #1: Purchase History
By Anurag Wadehra in Cartoons, Personalization, Recommendations, eCommerce on November 16, 2011
This is the first in Baynote’s ten-part series of cartoons by award-winning cartoonist Tom Fishburne, titled “Intent to Buy”. Please let us know what you think of this cartoon. To say thanks for your input, we’ll send you a print signed by Tom if you post a comment within one week (U.S. addresses only).
We’re really excited to debut the first illustration commissioned by Baynote from Tom Fishburne, “The Marketoonist.” The cartoon series, called “Intent to Buy”, will humorously shed light on the top challenges faced by marketers and e-commerce professionals as they try to personalize and improve the online experience in the wake of heightened consumer expectations. We’ll be introducing a new cartoon every other Wednesday for the next 20 weeks so please check back in regularly and we encourage you to share ideas about additional e-commerce personalization pain points you’d like to see lampooned in future installments.
In keeping with the theme of the series title, we’ll be examining the important and often overlooked element of understanding consumer intent…and what goes wrong when e-commerce and marketing teams fail to personalize based on intent.
Our first cartoon parodies a quintessential personalization mistake that many retailers still make and one that has affected our experience as consumers at one point or another: living and dying by profiles. Past purchase history and shopper profile data needs to be factored into the overall picture, but more often than not this information doesn’t represent what a buyer is actually looking for in the moment. This is because individual interests and shopping objectives are simply far too dynamic for retailers to predict using historical information.
The future of personalization is about understanding intent, not profiles. Think about the clues your web visitors are sending out as they engage with your touchpoints – things like search terms they use both to get to your site through Google and in onsite search engines such as Endeca, what they click on, how long they dwell on a product, what products they compare and more. We call these intent clues because they tell you what the visitor is trying to do – and they’re available to you whether or not you know the name, address and shoe size of the visitor. Once you’re tuned in to intent clues, adding in profile data can be quite valuable. But without any insight about intent, profile data alone has limited personalization power.
Are you personalizing based on intent?
A big issue is highly-specific shopping. Once you have that in your search or click history it becomes very targeted for Ad-sense and others. For example I booked a specific up-market all inclusive family vacation in April last year. I have correspondence from that company in my gmail. Now pretty much 1 in 4 web banners I get via Google is for the same company. This is a once a year purchase at best. It is a total waste of advertizing for the client company and a minor annoyance for me.
Fundamentally, it’s a great concept – I bought “X” so additional ads or suggestions for similar items seem to make sense. But when I’ve one time bought the super-duper collector edition of Lord of the Rings for my nerd-geek husband, it does NOT mean I want all my future recommendations to be based on that purchase! I’m talking to you, Amazon, and I have my own taste. Maybe there’s a way to look at the frequency and type of purchases before blasting “matches”? There’s a ways to go but it’s fascinating stuff.
I can totally relate to the comic on how ridiculous it is to get ads for things that does not relate to me based on one transaction. This clearly shows that social media CRM is still at a premature stage.
When my roommate recently moved in, I sorted the mails and there was a jewelry and a girly clothing catalog in the mail for him. I wanted to be sensitive so I just said, “I didn’t know you like these stuff”. It turned out he shared an address with his girlfriend before.
Don’ts:
Send me a coupon to buy more, immediately After I just bought.
Send me countless emails 7 days a week about specials. I am not a shopaholic and I don’t need to buy everyday.
Make me a fill out a survey, enter my contact information, answer the first two lengthy fill-in-the blank questions on “name all the brands you’ve seen at our store”. Then tell me that Oh, the quota for this survey has been met…and you will not be entered in the drawing!!! Needless to say, I will now throw every survey I get immediately without bothering to fill it out. And I bet their sample size is way out of whack from people who feel the same way!
I tweeted about this last week. I knew my boyfriend had been on Amazon because I was getting emails suggesting I buy a wind turbine, random carpenters’ tools and hunting gear. I see he isn’t looking for my Christmas gifts.
Years ago in college I bought a friend a funny book about pot and another one about graphic design. Amazon for years thought I was a pot smoking graphic designer. Even after I changed them to gifts, they still pop up time to time.
BUT nothing is perfect and I give them an “A” for effort. Now to teach my boyfriend to get his own account.
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I like it. Even the ‘best’ recommenders screw this up (Amazon, Zappos, Netflix etc.). A similar problem is telling the difference between people who want 1 of something vs. people who want more (I may not need more than 1 Indian cookbook, but someone who behaves like me may want a big stack). Another trap is retargeting (e.g. ads based on abandoned carts). Sometimes, the customer is distracted or just unsure, and a nudge might help. Sometimes, the customer specifically decided no, and the retargeting feels wrong and intrusive.
Darn. Now I can’t get the ‘My Little Pony’ theme song out of my head.
A cartoon idea would be people signing up for sweepstakes online. I have and I get tons of emails now. I figure the odds of winning a sweepstakes are at least as good as that of the lottery or a casino. Maybe there’s a support group for this, too.
The cartoon is great.
There goes that song again…
The best merchants have moved far beyond static (“top sellers”) and profile-based recommendations. At those sites, you magically encounter the stuff you would most like to buy. The best merchants have long since deployed recommendations based on intent, and are now trying to figure out how to deliver compelling mobile recommendations based on recent browser activity, and vice versa.
I love your cartoons. Now can you produce one explaining why I always get the “botox is dead – here’s the miracle solution that plastic surgeons don’t want you to know” or similar whenever I open Facebook?
My wife and I share a credit card account. You should see some of the “interesting” suggestions I get when I shop online.
Let’s talk about automatic enrollment in various “helper” type blogs. Each time I purchase something I am getting these automatic check boxes for various weekly e-mails, daily tips, bi-weekly blog follow-ups and so on.
From My Little Pony to Harley parts, it’s always about intent of the shopper, no matter who they are shopping for. Profiles don’t cut it, generic recomendations don’t cut it. it must be real, and it must be reall time intent based.
You guys are in the right track….. Keep it up!
It’s not really funny.. And to be honest, a bit crap.
Anyway, how do you “personalise on intent” when you don’t use cookies? So you can’t effectively “personalise”, just use crowd behaviour.
Andrew,
Sorry you didn’t like the cartoon. Stay tuned – there are funnier ones coming (imho). As for your comment on our approach – we personalize on intent by observing 24 different aspects of a web visitor’s behavior (anonymously) during their visit. We don’t need to use a cookie to do that – but it does take some pretty serious rocket science (patented) to interpret all the signals and adjust the products, search results and content the user sees as they progress through their visit.