Globalising and Personalising

You should be able to discuss consumers globalizing and personalizing their online information sources with reference to relevant technologies and impacts for marketing
A powerful force drives the world towards a converging commonality and that force is technology. It has proletarianized communication, transport and travel making people in geographically dispersed areas wanting everything they’ve heard, seen or experienced via technology.
The result is a new commercial reality- the emergence of global markets for standardized consumer products on a previously unimagined scale of magnitude. Gone are accustomed differences in national and regional preferences. The globalization of markets is at hand and with that comes the global consumer no longer bound by such preferences. Corporations geared to this new reality benefit from economies of scale in production, distribution, marketing and management. By translating these benefits into reduced world prices they can decimate competitors still operating on old assumptions.
However, the ‘global consumer’ is also more demanding with reference to the technological tools they use. Broadly marketed Web sites face an increasingly diverse and demanding audience. Each visitor may be searching for something different, and each may have unique needs or concerns. Traditional, "static" Web sites can try to serve these diverse users by aiming at generalized types of user. However, generalizing the audience may cause an information designer to overlook users who do not quite fit in a category. A more effective way to reach diverse audiences might be adaptive Web sites that customize content and interface to suit each individual.
Customization is the site’s ability to tailor itself- Tailorization, or be tailored by the user – Personalisation. To better address individual consumer needs, companies must allow their websites to be altered by the user or organization. Personalisation allows users to specify their preferences in content selection, context selection and personalization tools. Once personal preferences have been entered by the user and saved, the site uses a log-in registration or “cookies” to match each returning user to his/her personal settings. The site then configures itself to these settings accordingly.

Personalised online communication is an opportunity to reduce mass marketing expenses
and increase response rate by personalizing their marketing for each customer.
This info gives e-commerce companies an opportunity to create one to one marketing relationship also an opportunity to enhance CRM by adapting to individual user preferences based on information collected through personalization means. Eg financial organizations trying to cross –sell or up sell products.
Personalised communication is a form of Permission based marketing and is divided into 5 primary forms
· Personalised Permission emails – asks personal info when user signs up
· Personalised recommendation- these services use sophisticated algorithms to determine the products that might be of greatest interest to particular customers based on past purchase behaviour . without this information customers might not otherwise know about these recommended products. Some sites make recommendations to the user based on the preferences of other users with similar usage profiles (eg. Collaborative Filtering)
· Personalised advertisements- Based on past behaviour in the form of clicks on advertisements, which web ads must be shown to which users can be pre determined. Eg- ZDNet
· Personalised web pages
· Personalised e-commerce stores- Online merchants use the internet/ technology as well as knowledge on customers to tailor their products and services to them. eg. Amazon. OfficeDepot offers its small business customers personalized catalogs, allowing businesses to create real-time unique catalogs for their employees- based on their buying authority. In addition to making customers shopping experiences more pleasant, personalization is a key for increasing switching costs. Once the customer becomes dependant on the website that offers personalized services, it will be more costly to switch sites.

Following are some features used to attract and retain users:
Log-in registration- having previously registered on a site, the user returns and enters the requisite identification information. The site then recognizes the user and reconfigures itself to the preset preferences accordingly.
Cookies- Website owners can track and gather data about returning users’ behaviour by quietly saving identifying and tracking information on the users’ local disk storage in temporary files called “cookies”.
Personalised eMail accounts- Sites can provide free accounts for users to send and receive emails from the site using a unique email address.
Content and Layout Configuration- Users can select site screen layout and content sources based on their interests.
Storage- sites provide virtual hard disk storage space where users can store e-mail, URL’s and other interesting content.
Agents- Users can initiate computer programs also known as agents designed to perform specific simple tasks (eg. Notify them when product is in stock)
Sites can also dynamically (through software) publish unique versions of the site to address a specific user’s interest’s habits or needs. The site can also be designed to reconfigure and present different contents with various design layouts to individual users depending on each user’s response and/or profile. Some sites make recommendations to the user based on the preferences of other users with similar usage profiles (eg. Collaborative Filtering)
Adaptive Web sites are not the same as adaptable Web sites, although both kinds of sites seek to customize the user's visit. Adaptable Web sites require some deliberate input from a user, such as choosing from a set of preferences, in order to tailor the site's presentation.

Figure 2: Amazon.com's product pages have predicted ratings and recommendations based on other customers' purchases [2].
The adaptability is user-controlled and initiated. [7] Portal Web sites such as Yahoo.com and iWon.com are adaptable; they allow users with Yahoo or iWon accounts to choose how information is displayed on their personal view of the Web site. For example, Yahoo users can choose the types of news that they would like on their my.yahoo.com page.
Adaptive systems, on the other hand, generally customize the Web site by unobtrusively observing the user's actions [7, 10]. Amazon.com uses an adaptive system based on previous purchases and click-throughs to recommend products that the customer might want to buy. It highlights products related to previous purchases and click-throughs on the home page. On the individual product pages, Amazon.com lists items that other people who bought this particular title also bought. This latter feature is a form of collaborative filtering where a peer (in this case someone who bought the music album that the user is looking at) "recommends" a title that the user might like based on their shared interest in that book. Figure 2 shows an Amazon.com product page that lists related music purchases as well as a prediction for how much the author will like this title. Other Web sites that use adaptive systems to recommend products include Qrate.com and MovieLens (http://movielens.umn.edu).
Adaptive Web sites are a subgroup of attentive systems, or systems that attend to what the user is doing and then respond. Paul P. Maglio et al. claim that attentive systems should provide relevant but not critical information [10]. Amazon.com is a good example of this requirement. It recommends products for the user to browse, but these recommendations are not a crucial part of the user's visit to the Web site. The user can ignore the recommendations and still get full functionality from the site.


The theory behind personalization is that it prevents users from being subjected to a series of advertisements or promotions for a product they are not interested in. The idea of advertising is that the “right ad reaches the right person”. Personalisation equips the marketer with the appropriate ammunition for their target audience.
However with personalization comes the potential infringement of privacy of users information. To allow personalization means the marketers / companies must know personal information about the users. Customers on the other hand are increasingly becoming uneasy about their personal information being widely known.
Hence a delicate balance between privacy and personalization is required.