Balancing big data with a big voice

Back in the day, loyalty communications were pretty simple.

You got a Welcome Pack when you joined and then periodic points statements after that.  The statements may have contained some offers, and if you were really lucky, these may have been personalised in some way.  Some people really pushed the boat out and sent individual mailings with specific offers, normally in response to a lack of behaviour, trying to get you back in-store.

Then email arrived and it became much cheaper to be relevant - or so we thought.  In practice it just became much cheaper.  Emails were sent, even if there wasn't anything particularly relevant to say and if you didn't like it... well you could always opt-out.  So what happened to that dream of 1-2-1 marketing?


Quite simply, it's actually pretty hard to be relevant all the time.

Sure you can use analytical techniques to target customers who you think have a propensity to do something.  Or you can respond to customers with trigger marketing based on their behaviours (i.e. not purchased in a little while) and send an email to encourage them back.  However, for regular communications it's much harder to create customised content for each member based on their exhibited behaviours - for many programmes it's just too hard (or costly) to be relevant.


But there is a simpler way - just ask the customer what they'd like through the use of a preference centre.

With an increasing number of channels and ways of interacting with customers, a simple opt-in/out marketing permission doesn't really cut it any more.  Customers are being trained by social networks like Facebook that allow them to manage who can access their data and for what purpose.

For example, with a simple Facebook wall post I can choose whether to hide that post or not, increase or decrease further posts from that friend, unsubscribe from further communications from that friend or unfriend them completely.  With apps, I get further choices - deciding whether that app/partner can for example access my personal information, access my friends or post on my wall.

LinkedIn go one better and intelligently look to help you control preference.  If you subscribe to a group on LinkedIn and opt in to receive updates via email, LinkedIn will proactively dial-down the frequency of communications if you haven't visited the group for a while.


Preference centres essentially help to manage this by giving customers control over what communications they want to receive, about what topics, over what channels and at what frequency.  Email marketing specialist Adestra reports that preference centres can have a real impact on unsubscribe rates, suggesting that giving customers choice keeps them engaged.  Digital marketing specialists Smart Insights provide some advice on the use of preference centres suggesting that you don't offer what you can't deliver.  If you provide choice in terms of topic or frequency, make sure you have the content and capability to manage this.

If you google preference centres however, they seem to be a feature of email marketing but, little else.  This is I think needs to change.


Preference centres need to become a key feature of loyalty programmes to control preferences for all aspects of the programme and to help manage some of the innovations that are just around the corner.

• For gamification features, members are going to want control about what achievements are posted to which social channels and when.  This  "social currency" is where the key value is within gamification, but that value will only work if the member feels in control.  
• Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) functions will allow members to manage their loyalty data and which partners and/or applications can access this on their behalf.  Like Facebook, members will expect to be able to control both who has access to the data and what data is shared.  They'll also want to able to terminate these relationships at will.
• The "Internet of Things" will bring a host of interactions that can be recognised and rewarded, but members will want to be able to control what can be seen (and recorded) and what can't.  Just because my toothbrush can tweet it's usage, doesn't mean I want it to.

With an increased focus on "Big Data" and the headlong trend to get more and more data from more and more sources it can sometimes be easy to forget that there is a customer at the heart of that data and they'd actually like to be heard.

Sure, we can use the data to work out when someone might be pregnant based on their purchase patterns, and this can be really useful to both the retailer and the customer.

We could also just provide the customer with an easy way to tell us and to give them a big voice...

Did the Grinch steal Christmas (TV)?

I miss the Christmas movie.

As a child, when we only had three TV channels, no VHS and single screen cinemas, the Christmas movie was for many people the first time the movie had been seen.

We'd cherish the Radio Times to see what was on and then plan ahead to watch all the great movies.

How times have changed.

I now have IPTV on 3 different boxes, I can choose to watch a film on demand through BT, Sony or LoveFilm. Invariably I've already seen it at our 10 screen cinema, purchased it on DVD or loaded it onto my iPad.

I watch more films, but they don't have the same special magic they used to. I still buy the Radio Times, but that's largely because it's the Christmas thing to do - I have an EPG on my TV and TV Guide on my iPad.

The Grinch didn't really steal Christmas TV - instead it was our desire to have everything now at the touch of a button, and the medias desire to supply it.

I'm not saying any of this is a bad thing. We've essentially traded the Christmas Movie that was created through scarcity for the everyday convenience of entertainment on demand.

What's interesting though is how this plethora of choice for something we really wanted and valued can actually result in us valuing it less.

Seth Godin discussed this in a recent blog entitled The inevitable decline due to clutter where he discussed the trend within digital to just keep giving consumers more of everything - more messages, more offers - because essentially it's free. However he points out that:-

Once you overload the user, you train them not to pay attention. More clutter isn't free. In fact, more clutter is a permanent shift, a desensitization to all the information, not just the last bit.

We saw exactly this effect in some research we carried out a couple of years back. When looking at communications within retail, there was a increase in relationship strength as communications increased - suggesting that building a dialogue with customers is a positive thing to do.

However this quickly turned into a decrease as these communications became too frequent. Customers were tuning out of the communications as they got overloaded and at the same time, were tuning out of the brand.

If you want to keep customers coming back, want to keep them interested, then you need to keep things special.

• Change the experience - Mix things up a little. Email is great and it's cheap, but finding other ways to communicate, even if it's just an occasional quality DM piece can really cut through.
• Keep it relevant - It's better to send nothing than to send something irrelevant. If a customer consistently finds nothing of value in your communications they will simply cease to value them.
• Facilitate, don't just communicate - As the clutter increases, people shut down the overload and start to look internally to friends for opinion. Be part of that conversation.

A great example of someone doing this currently is Coca-Cola. They have always "owned" Christmas, having Santa Claus in their advertising since the 1930's, but there is always a risk that people become "desensitised" to it.

This year however they have had their Coca Cola Truck touring Europe and this has managed to do all three things.

It has changed the experience, bringing the advertising to life. It has kept it relevant, doing something we'd expect from Coke at a time of year when we want it. Most importantly though, it has facilitated the conversation, with friends snapping pictures of the truck locally and posting them to Facebook (here's one a friend of mine took)

Having driven past it on the motorway, there is something almost magical about seeing it in real life - even if it is just a truck. I may have been even more excited than my kids - but it's nice that some things are still special.

Grinch image by Mykl Roventine (Flickr)

The art of collecting

I was never a big sports fan, but for some reason collecting Panini football stickers was a big part of my childhood. I couldn't really care less about the teams or the players - most of whom I'd never have recognised - it was just the collecting itself which was exciting. Being able to swap with friends and if you were really lucky, getting the silver ones with the club badges on.

It seems nothing has changed - Panini are still pushing out sticker books and kids are still collecting them.

It's not just kids though - many people like to collect - whether it's shoes or stamps.

I'm not talking about pathological collectors -those who feel a need to collect things so that it affects their ordinary life. Like the guy from California (why is it always California) who just had to recently sell his banana themed collection.

I'm also not talking about those who's desire to collect something first drives them to extraordinary lengths. For example, the 15 year old Parker Liautaud who was first to collect the FourSquare Last Degree Badge by checking in at the North Pole.

What I'm talking about is those more normal people who just feel compelled to make that next purchase or seek out that next item.

Given that collecting is such as powerful force within frequency marketing programmes - whether its people collecting points or the sales promotions at the local petrol station where you collect glasses - understanding how people start collecting is important to get a loyalty programme up and running.

At a simple level the act of collecting is essentially one behaviour that is linked to a previous one - to be a collector you must by definition have started.

In the famous article on The Endowed Progress Effect by Nunes & Drèze, they showed how you can kick start people into collecting by simply making them feel they have already started. By awarding people with points upfront, the members were more likely to continue collecting and would actually collect faster - showing increased engagement or desire to collect. They described the reasons for this saying:-

[Previous research] demonstrated that interrupted or uncompleted actions engender a strong motivation to complete the action and psychologists agree that once a person accepts a task, for whatever reason, he or she tends to stay on that course until the goal is achieved

So part of getting people to collect is to get them to feel their collection is both incomplete - so there is more to do - and that they have already started collecting and so feel compelled to continue.

It's one thing to get people started however, but how do you keep the behaviour going. How do you get them from one behaviour to the next, and more importantly, how do you get them making increasingly larger commitments - giving you a greater share of wallet or opening up a new category they haven't purchased in before.

In the book Yes! 50 Secrets from the Science of Persuasionthey discussed ways of getting one large behaviour change by essentially "softening" people up in the first instance. Linking one action to another by starting with something small and seemingly insignificant to then get them to do something bigger which they wouldn't ordinarily have accepted.

The example given was an experiment that asked home owners in a posh neighbourhood to display a large sign on their lawn (6' x 3') saying "DRIVE CAREFULLLY". When asked first off for this, only 17% complied. However when they were asked two weeks before to display a small sign in their window saying "BE A CAREFUL DRIVER", the compliance rate shot up to 76% for the larger sign.

The book goes on to explain why this happened saying:-

"The evidence suggests that after agreeing to the request, the residents came to see themselves as committed to worthy causes such as safe driving. When [..] approached a couple of weeks later, they were motivated to act consistently with this perception of themselves."

This softening or "Priming" as it's described in the book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happinessworks by aligning peoples thinking - for example, simply asking people who they might vote for makes them more likely to actually go out and vote.

This becomes key within loyalty through ongoing communications. We know for example that communications sent across multiple channels increase overall response rates within a campaign and this is probably in part because the first communication "primes" for the subsequent one. Combining this with some form of low risk call to action suggests that subsequent messages for a larger commitment would get a far greater response rate.

Members of a loyalty programme have traditionally been called collectors. To get the best out of a programme though it is probably also worth treating them as collectors and building in specific mechanisms which encourage both the initial behaviour to get them started in their collection as well as helping to direct them ongoing to maximise it.

Mazda get some Zoom Zoom from data

Mazda’s customer dialogue service is reaping real results with a reported increase of 10% for first services – this at a time when having your car serviced is viewed by some as an unnecessary luxury with 15% of people indicating they had deferred their last service.

So what has Mazda done to buck this trend and actually increase the number of people coming back to them.  Well in part it’s through the use of a retention programme with a combination of tried and tested timely communications coupled with some interesting “sticky” features.

However the first real innovation in the Mazda programme was not communications or features – instead it was the more mundane requirement of data collection.

If there is one thing many car manufactures don’t have it’s up to date, clean customer data.  An outcome that arises from historically very manual processes – like paper log books – and a channel based sales network meaning that the manufacturer has little or no customer details.  Compounding this is that due to second hand car sales and customer movements, even the best dealer database struggles to stay up to date between the long buying cycles.

The solution then for Mazda was DSR or its Digital Service Record, described as “an innovative electronic service booklet, which replaces the traditional booklet that you used to get stamped following a vehicle service”.  More importantly though is that the “vehicle's service history is stored digitally on a central Mazda database”

It’s this centralised storage of vehicle (and customer) details which has allowed Mazda to build it’s retention programme

When DSR was first launched to dealers back in 2005 it was well received with dealers recognising the potential benefits for customers over and above the operational aspects of servicing a car.  One dealer in the UK was quoted at the time as saying

"It is an ideal asset for nurturing customer retention with its tracking capability. The critical time comes after a car is three years old. It will highlight for dealers how much business they retain or lose from the network and should help keep more customers within Mazda’s orbit."

Mazda are making good use of this database, using it to target customers due for a service with both service notification mailings as well as “missed service” reminders – all of which generate extra business for dealers.  They are also targeting customers of older cars to come back in to Mazda – generating additional footfall and opportunities.

All of this is only possible with good, up to date data and there is always a price for getting customers to provide it – the trick is doing this at the least cost and then extracting the most long term return.

A retail loyalty programme giving points for spend is essentially paying customers to swipe their card – to identify themselves on their transaction.  This data has then been paid for through the issuance of points – how you use this data to extract additional value is your return. 

What Mazda did was indentify an opportunity to collect data whilst providing a win-win for all stakeholders.  For the customer they have a secure, maintained service record, ensuring maximum future sales value – this in turn creates value for the dealer as customers will want to ensure this is maintained and so will return.

Whether you’re an automotive company, a restaurant or retailer, knowing who your customers are and what they do is an important first step in building a relationship with them – essentially creating a retention programme. 

Only when you have sight of this information can you create timely and relevant communications which maintain or change behaviour as Mazda have done.

The trick is to find the opportunities to collect this information at the lowest possible cost whilst gaining the greatest overall return.  Collecting data and not getting a return from it is just as bad as not making the investment to collect it in the first place.

Want to add a little Zoom Zoom into your customer relationships?  It might be worth thinking about what data you could collect and/or make work harder which is currently ignored, lost or only held locally?

The element of surprise

I know winter has arrived - it has finally changed from warm rain to cold rain – and in the last few weeks we’ve had a good drenching. 

This brought the inevitable wet floor underfoot and to my amusement there was a sign in my office saying “Wet Floor”. 

Apart from the fact that I’m obviously easily amused, the reason this entertained me was because the sign is there almost every day, and this was the first time I've actually seen the floor wet.

The problem is, the more the sign is used, or any communication for that matter - especially where it shouldn’t be used – the more people tune out of it and begin to ignore it. 

It fails to get cut through.

Whether the communication is for health and safety or customer loyalty it should have the same purpose - to change behaviour.

• If your predominant form of loyalty communication is a points statement, showing points earned, redeemed and a closing balance
• If your statement is sent every month or every quarter
• If your statement is sent with un-targeted inserts or statement messages

Guess what – it’s going to fail to get cut through.

You need to shake thinks up a little and surprise people.

Developing a Customer Conversation

Building customer loyalty and engagement - essentially creating a relationship - is much like having a conversation, just over an extended period of time.

Whoever initiates it, whether it is the brand through communications or the customer through a first interaction, the aim is to continue the conversation.

The last thing you want as a brand is to be viewed as socially inept – a social bore - with customers looking to get away at the first instance.

American novelist Edgar Watson Howe famously said of having a conversation:-

No man would listen to you talk if he didn’t know it would be his turn next

The trick with loyalty communications is to get the customer to know it’s their turn to respond and this means creating relevant, engaging communications which demand a response – an interaction.

In order to get a response you first need to listen - no one likes to be talked at or talked over.

In a marketing sense customers are talking to you all the time – feedback in what they buy and what they don’t; when they complain, when they ask questions – in every interaction. If you’re not listening to this and simply send them the next “mass message” (or no message at all) why be surprised when 95% simply give up the conversation.

Even when you listen and respond back with something relevant, you need to consider how to keep the conversation going.

Within a normal conversation, if you answer the question “Where are you from?” with a one word answer such as “Northampton”, don’t expect much more from the conversation. People need something to build upon to keep a conversation going – giving them a reason to respond and letting them know it is their turn next.

If they’ve never heard of Northampton they will struggle to move the conversation forward and likewise for a brand if you, for example, simply say “Thank You” after a purchase, the customer will have no reason to continue the conversation.

Look at conversation experts Amazon – they lead you up to the purchase with wish lists and recommendations and after purchase make further suggestions that fit with your purchase and then ask you to review the purchase. Always looking to extend the conversation – letting you know it’s your turn.

In a white paper by Bazaar Voice they call the development of this conversation the Participation Chain, going on to say:-

[the] “participation chain” – [is] a way of cultivating user involvement so that each action builds upon the one before, building value along the way.

Going on to recommend that you “look for participation dead ends, such as thank you pages that lead nowhere [and] consider possible ways to follow up.”

This doesn’t just apply to e-commerce sites. Think about an individual you’ve spoken to who always relates the same story when you meet – would you be keen to seek out this person at a social function… probably not.

From a brand perspective, if every time someone comes to your site they see the same content do you really think they’ll want to continue the conversation? Are you actually enabling them to have a conversation or simply talking over them every time they come with the same old message (or a message you want to talk about regardless)

Building a conversation with customers is critical to building engagement; and increased engagement leads to increased customer value. As Bazaar Voice points out:-

Time and money are two sides of the same coin. In general, the more time a customer spends with you – assuming a positive experience – the more likely they are to spend money with you.

As a brand it might be worth brushing up on those social skills to develop a customer conversation – learning how to be a social more, not a social bore.

When reality bytes – a view into Augmented Reality

Augmented reality is one of the hottest topics around at the moment – it holds out much promise, but also the potential for much hype.

Unlike Virtual Reality – one of the last hot topics - Augmented Reality or AR uses the real world as a base to overlay additional detail and information. Also unlike the more niche Virtual Reality, AR has the prospect of engaging a much wider audience.

The challenge for AR however is to move from a interesting but currently niche technology to a useful, desired and mass marketing tool.

The challenge for brands is how to utilise this technology to engage and connect with consumers, providing additional ways to interact.

What’s great is that solving the second challenge will ultimately solve the first.

When I first started writing this blog my initial thoughts were to discuss how brands could use AR to create interesting interactions with consumers. However in researching it and finding some great pioneering examples this blog is about how brands are using AR and what we can learn.

Bringing it to life

GE have utilised AR to create a deeper emotional experience for their Plug Into the Smart Grid campaign. Consumers can print off an AR marker and then when viewed via their webcam, the sheet of paper comes to life showing a 3D representation of the smart grid.

The same technology could be used to view a a car brochure for example, showing the car in full 3D on top of a 2D brochure.

Better still, rather than bringing the car brochure to life, why not bring the car itself to life. Place the marker on the floor outside and you could see the car sitting virtually on your drive outside your house.

Want a new plasma TV, not sure how it will look on your wall – why not simply view it in place virtually.

The US postal service is using this technique to allow customers to see if the item they want to send will fit within a given box – showing the box actually overlaid on the item.

Lego are also using a similar approach, allowing consumers to pickup a box of unassembled Lego and view it through AR to see the fully assembled model sitting on top of the box in full 3D, allowing you to view it at all angles.

Many of these applications however fit the “pre-purchase validation” model. They allow you to virtually try before you buy, seeing the product in a real world scenario.

This is great for helping with more complex purchases or those that require a little extra reassurance, but what about everyday purchases. How could AR work for example with FMCG brands?

Many brands are looking to build longevity and increased interaction into the purchase process, using on-pack codes for example to create and foster loyalty. Whether it’s BudBucks from Budweiser, Brit Trips from Walkers or Coke Zone from Coca-Cola.

However the issue with all of these solutions is ongoing usage – stemming in part from the process required for code entry. Using AR and existing solutions could provide a more engaging experience.

Imagine viewing your can of drink through your phone’s camera and whilst it logs your purchase (through a marker such as a shotcode) it simultaneously shows your current balance and a selection of available rewards, all overlaid in real time on the drink that is sitting in front of you - in fact the can itself could evolve into the different rewards as you look at it.

In essence the combination of your phone and a can of drink becomes your loyalty card, your loyalty statement and your rewards catalogue.

Metaio, a pioneer in the area of augmented reality technology provides a view into how AR can be overlaid on a consumer product – showing how a packet of cereal can be brought to life.

With younger and younger kids having mobile phones, you can see how this could replace the “purchase with gift” sales promotion.

I’m really excited by the prospects of this technology and how it can be utilised not just for fun short term sales promotions but to actually provide value in the longer term - supporting consumers through the buying process and ongoing reward and recognition.

This is a fast moving technology and as phones get quicker and more feature rich it’s only going to grow.

PS. Can’t think of a marketing application – but AR allowing you see through walls – now that’s an interesting development. ;o)

No postal service in less than 10 years?

Another year, another price rise for the cost of postage. This one seems to have gone by almost unnoticed as I think the G20 and the associated news of President Obama visiting and rioting anarchists has kind of filled the airwaves.

For those that missed it, the price of posting a letter has gone up by 3p to 39p for First Class and 30p for Second Class - this is an increase of over 8% so not exactly linked to inflation. In fact, the Royal Mail indicates that they made a loss of over £100m last year on the Universal Service and would need a price rise of more like 6p per stamped letter to close this gap.

Back in 2000, the Post Office warned that European proposals to cut their monopoly could ultimately see the price of a stamp rising to over £1 - citing the issue that posting a letter from London to Scotland actually cost £2.50 but within London just 15p and breaking up their monopoly would see profitable business cherry picked, leaving just unprofitable and expensive to service rural business.

Mail volumes are also falling with increasing rapidity. They fell 2.3% in 2007 and 3.2% in 2008 - that’s a rate of decline of 139% year on year which if continued (and Chief Exec Adam Crozier seems to think it will – predicting an 8% decline next year) would see the average daily mail bag go from 83m in 2006 to almost nothing by 2018.

So here is my prediction - in less than a decade the daily postal service will be dead.

There will obviously still be some form of hand delivered mail, but it will be less frequent (weekly?) and more expensive.

Possible Scenario?

Ok, so thats a pretty apocalyptic prediction, but even if the rate of decline stayed at 3.2%, the mail bag will have halved in just 20 years time - meaning we would have a very different service than today.

You could argue that the Post Office could turn this situation around by creating innovative products and services, however when national institutions like TV Licensing are increasingly offering their services by email - removing potentially millions of posted letters - and banks and utility companies are pushing towards paperless statementing it doesn’t bode well.

This does bring some interesting thoughts and opportunities however.

A recent Business Insider article worked out that it would be cheaper for the New York Times to give every reader a free an e-book device (like the Amazon Kindle) and shut down the print presses - delivering the news paper electronically and by subscription.

This got me thinking about the postal service - what if we just stopped hand-delivering letters and simply sent them electronically to a device which was provided for this purpose by the Post Office. Giving a £200 e-reader to 28m homes in the UK would cost about £5.6bn – not a small number but at present postage levels of around 20.8bn letters per year, that’s less than 27p per letter - just 70% of the current cost to post it.

Not as far fetched as it might sound and there is definitely precedent. Mobile phone companies have been subsidising their handsets for years in order to drive up usage and it has worked, with over 100% penetration. The mobile network Blyk has gone one better and removed ongoing usage costs as well by allowing brands to target messages to its subscribers - a typically hard to reach teen market.

I suspect it won’t be the Post Office that ultimately offers this service however and instead someone will develop the business model that provides free devices and ongoing usage in return for allowing brands, service providers and content creators to push information to it.

This is going to change the way brands communicate.

Hand delivered items will go up in price, meaning this channel will be used sparingly and where it shows real results. People will receive so little physical mail that there will be a buzz and excitement about anything delivered - almost going back to the days of the hand delivered telegram – so expect higher response rates for well targeted and less frequent communications.

Image from LiquaVista

Electronically delivered letters via an e-reader will be different to emails in the same way that email is different to SMS. More creative, more tactile and higher dwell time - they will be consumed in a different setting and at a different time and so content will need to be specific.

As for the devices - yes they are a little crude today with almost all commercially available models having a black and white screen and a large surround. However Fujitsu have just launched their FLEPia colour e-book in Japan and flexible, rollable, colour displays will be with us in the next couple of years. Checkout Shane Richmond’s blog at the Telegraph for a run down of some of the devices around.

The paperless home is fast approaching providing secure (no more shredding), instant (no more delay) and portable (no waiting at home) communications.

I’m afraid the Postman is going the same way as the milkman, the pop man (remember home delivered Corona!) and the rag and bone man - it’s a bygone age waiting to happen.

I am not a number - I am a free man (or woman)

Marketing to baby boomers is an interesting issue. Previously brands trying to attract an older audience could simply put an older person in the advert with an attractive pen or carriage clock and watch the customers pile in… well that was probably never true, but more recently the "older" generation has changed – it no longer considers itself "old" – age is just a number.

This really came home to me a couple of weeks ago when I was looking over some work we did for a financial services brand in the US. The brand had successfully communicated what it was about – telling people that it had products and services aimed at an older audience – the problem was its target audience of over 50's didn't consider themselves old and thought it was for someone "older".

This seems to be an increasing problem for brands looking to market to older customers, especially where these brands already have an established older customer base which they need to retain, but want to continue to attract new customers. A brand tackling this head-on is coffee & tea merchant Taylors of Harrogate - the ground coffee market has a skew to over 45's, so how do you make the brand relevant to new customers without alienating the existing customer base.

Taylors have done this with the introduction of new campaign, "The Coffee of Choice" which has a more edgy creative feel than the traditional corporate Taylors of Harrogate site and matches perfectly to their recent above the line creative. A tie up with Classic FM is helping to ensure the message reaches their target audience, but the creative is helping to make the brand stand-out and seem more relevant. This has been combined with a great selection of ground coffees which are packaged by occasion and blend – helping to appeal to both the new coffee consumer and the more established coffee connoisseur.

Nintendo has been targeting this market as well, but unlike Taylors who had an established audience; Nintendo was trying to create a market from the ground-up. Since the launch of the Wii and subsequently the Wii fit, demand has outstripped supply and the console has been propelled to pole position, with sales greater than both the XBOX360 and the PS3. This is largely down to the introduction of the gaming console to new segments – including the over 50's – or as Nintendo puts it "moving into the blue ocean", based on the book Blue Ocean Strategy. The advertising for the Wii isn't aimed at any particular age demographic and instead shows families interacting and playing with the console – something that is attractive to both parents and grandparents. The DS handheld console however has different celebrity endorsements to appeal to specific market segments, using Fern and Holly and Girls Aloud for the hard to reach younger female market and Nicole Kidman, Ronan Keating and Patrick Stewart for the older demographic with Brain Training.

With 80% of the UK's wealth and representing over 50% of the population by 2020, the over 50's are not a niche segment that can be communicated to using a one-size-fits-all approach. In fact, age based demographics are becoming increasingly less relevant – to create relevance a communication really needs to be personalised and to personalise something needs behaviours. Having communications based on how a customer behaves rather than when they were born will always create greater cut-through.

The brands that win here will be the ones that truly know their customers.