Tech Trends in Practice

TREND 23Mass Personalization and Micro-Moments

The One-Sentence Definition

Mass personalization is about offering products and services at scale, but each uniquely tailored to our needs; micro-moments are the opportunities to respond to customer needs at an exact time when they need them.

What Are Mass Personalization and Micro-Moments?

Mass Personalization

Targeted mass marketing was developed by direct mail businesses in the 1960s and 1970s, to enable customers to be segmented by age, geography, or income and offered products they are more likely to be interested in.

Today, due to the internet, social media, and our always-connected society, more information is generated about who we are and what we do than ever before (see also Trend 4 on big data) – and all of this can be captured and analyzed by marketers and trend spotters.

This means they can offer us products and services uniquely tailored to meet our individual needs in increasingly individual ways. From personalized email marketing to setting tariffs based on our level or volume of consumption, mass personalization is now used to drive higher sales, increased customer satisfaction, and, hopefully, improved retention.

Online, data-driven mass personalization started out with determining a user’s geographical location from their IP address and directing them to a landing page serving their particular region. As the variety and volume of the data collected increase, so does the granularity with which customers can ...