No matter how remarkable or laudable a company's efforts at personalization, there will always be some people who simply are not interested. Every firm must be prepared to recognize and instantly accommodate any of the motivating factors that would cause a person to decide he or she doesn't want any sort of personalization.
(Editor's Note: This article is adapted from a new book "Making It Personal: How to Profit from Personalization without Invading Privacy." Read other excerpts at www.makingitpersonal.net )
From an individual's perspective, there are many situations or attitudes that make personalization unwelcome.
Anonymity preferred. There are many reasons why people might not want to be identified, from the innocent - it's a birthday present they don't want their spouse to discover in advance on their credit card statement - to the unethical or illegal. Some people are simply private, and prefer to mind their own business and let you mind yours. Others recognize the growing infringements on private space and choose to take the cautious route. A. Michael Froomkin, associate professor at the University of Miami School of Law, wrote, "Anonymity may be the primary tool available to citizens to combat the compilation and analysis of personal profile data, although data protection laws also may have some effect."
Lack of relevance. People do not want a relationship with companies that have no relevance to them. Computer programmers have no interest in getting to know an executive recruiter who only places sales executives. Homeowners who only buy the finest products for their home will not be interested in a cut-rate furniture store. If you've never been to Arkansas, never plan to go there, and don't know anyone there, you don't want to be on the mailing list of the Arkansas Tourism Board. On the Web, companies constantly ignore this factor and ask individuals for information before demonstrating to the person's satisfaction that their services are relevant. The prime example is companies that insist people fill out a lengthy form before they can gain access to a demo or to additional information. If a company asks people for information before it has demonstrated relevance, between 30 and 50 percent-depending on which statistics you believe-will lie to prevent revealing personal information. Catherine Legge, writing in her Net Effects column, nicely summed up a common attitude:
"I lie. And, I don't feel guilt or remorse. When it comes to giving out personal information online, I have the morality of Satan's spawn.
Sometimes I'm Candice and sometimes I go by my soap opera diva name, Ms. Styles.
I usually live in Beverly Hills because I know the zip code is 90210. When asked about income, I am a student who makes $0 to $12,000 a year.
Lying online is not wrong. It's survival.
The whole utopia of this free exchange of ideas has been choked out by opportunistic e-marketing types. I'm getting groped for information, flashed by profiled banner ads and then some page full of blanks wants to know my favorite color?"
On the flip side, people won't lie when they see relevance. If a firm wants my name and address so it can ship the windsurfer I'm eager to sail next weekend, I'll gladly give it and volunteer that they better jot down my phone number, just in case.
Untrustworthy. If you don't trust a company, it becomes a relationship of last resort. Unless you have no choice, you don't want to deal with it. People don't need proof that a company deserves to be in this category. Often, a small suggestion that this might be the case is enough to justify caution.
Hendrick A. Verfaillie, CEO of Monsanto, believes this is a time when a "shift in society - a shift that started perhaps forty years ago - is approaching full maturity. That shift has been a movement from a 'trust me' society to a 'show me' society. We don't trust government-and thus government rulemaking and regulation is suspect. We don't trust companies-or the new technologies they introduce into the marketplace. We don't trust the media-or the news they bring us each day. And so it goes with all institutions."
Lack of security. Good intentions aren't enough. If a company fails to protect its assets, and those of its stakeholders, then people will not be willing to share anything of value with the firm. Security is like sausage making <el> the more you know about it, the less likely you are to be comfortable. People have real reasons to fear that today's centralized networks aren't secure, because they aren't.
In January 2001, the names, e-mail addresses, phone numbers, and addresses of up to 51,000 customers were exposed on the Travelocity Web site. The customers had participated in two recent promotions, and the lists were accidentally left on a server after the company transferred the computer from San Francisco to New Orleans. The names were exposed for more than a month, said Jim Marsicano, executive vice president of sales and service for Travelocity. Blaming the problem on human error, Marsicano stressed that no customer order information was compromised by the security hole.
Technology firms are working to solve security problems, although most admit that security is a process, not a single technological solution. There are no quick fixes.
Impossible. Sometimes, people just aren't able to take advantage of attractive offers. If a company, local government, spouse, or neighborhood forbids a person from moving forward, that's life. Likewise, if people lack the ability to accept personalization-perhaps they lack a sophisticated enough cell phone, or a fast enough Web connection-it won't happen.
Tom Kelly is the general manager of IDEO, a design firm that helped create the first Apple mouse, Polaroid's I-Zone instant camera, and the Palm V Pilot. In a radio interview, Kelly talked about designing the Crest Neat Squeeze standup toothpaste tube. IDEO's goal was to get rid of the messy residue that fills the threads of screw-on toothpaste caps. The design firm came up with a solution that eliminated the threads altogether, seemingly a much better solution. The designers then watched consumers use the new cap and realized there was a big problem. After decades of opening and closing toothpaste containers, consumers had learned that toothpaste caps screw off. When confronted with one that didn't, they didn't know how to open it. Without observing people, it's easy to miss that they are simply not capable of doing all the tasks a company expects them to do.
Infrequent contact. People will have little interest in establishing a relationship with a cab driver in a city they rarely visit, or with the company that installs their new septic system (a once-in-twenty-five-years event.) Companies get around this limitation by broadening their services to increase the frequency of contacts. Hewlett-Packard's printer division used to focus on selling printers; now the firm realizes it can make more money selling printer cartridges, as well as paper, and in the process increase the frequency of its interactions with customers.
OnStar addresses this problem for General Motors, which never interacted with the consumers that bought its cars. The system, built into many GM cars, combines global positioning with wireless technologies to deliver personalized services. Real people back up the technology, offering 24/7/365 service, accessible at the touch of one button.
Little value placed on potential benefits. People may not recognize the value in offered personalization, such as when firms offer to customize product offers. Many people don't want to receive any such offers, period. Employees who are offered personalized training may not value it if they were unimpressed with their previous experiences with the training unit, and thus believe that even personalization won't make the time invested worthwhile.
As companies move towards the personal - and the number of interactions increases - it's important to gain greater objectivity about the attractiveness of a firm's offers. Today, in the early stages of our shift towards increasingly personal business relationships, most personalization is still superficial, and way too much of it is mainly personalized marketing. No matter how targeted advertising becomes, it still won't be anything more than a means to an end, and too much of it is flat-out annoying. People tolerate occasional annoyances, but when annoyances multiply, they begin to reek of harassment.
Even highly attractive offers won't make a difference to a person who doesn't value the potential benefits. Think about a new knowledge management system that theoretically delivers "better" information by filtering out "less relevant" citations. Many researchers may cringe at the thought, because they succeed by looking at raw data and thus understanding at a deeper level the background and related elements of a given situation.
