Holiday time is around the corner, gift buying is in full swing, and therefore the stress of getting “the best” gift starts to rise. What happens if I get a $20 gift and they get me a $100 gift? Well that’s certainly not fair, is it? What if I get something like a $100 gift card and they buy me a unique item I randomly mentioned 6 months ago? Well I’m not as thoughtful as them then, am I?
I think it’s essentially those two variables that make a good gift. The amount of money it costs and the amount of unique, personalization that goes into the gift.
I would argue that getting a good gift is pretty similar to creating a good marketing campaign. The variables that really determine the success of your campaign are similar - the amount of money spent and the level of unique personalization that goes into it.
Let’s start with the money part, which is a little easier to comprehend. If you’re building a video for part of a marketing campaign, that video may have a low production cost or a high production cost. While some really quality videos can be made with a low budget, spending more money will typically yield better results. What this means is that we can loosely correlate money with quality. The more money you spend, the more people can work on the campaign, the more polish it will have and the broader reach it can have through advertising. A good example would be an old Amazon Alexa superbowl ad. The ad itself costs and it’s packed with celebs, high production set costs, etc.
The second is the uniqueness part. Unique does not need to be expensive. Let’s use cold email as the most basic, easy to comprehend example. Like many folks, I can get 100+ cold emails a day, and most of them are horrible. They are clearly rinse and repeat spam emails that span every contact within their database with simple changes of first name and comapny.
But every once and awhile, there is something that has just a tad more care in it like this:
Unless I am dying for the product that is in the first example, I have almost no reason to respond. The second one, however, I typically will respond if the product mentioned is remotely interesting to me. I always need to learn new things and you seem like an interesting person to provide that insight to me. If I ever buy somehing, you can bet that you have a head start.
Uniqueness doesn’t need to be on a small scale. It can still be something that is sent to millions of people at once. A good example of this could be another super bowl commercial, the Coinbase one that had a jumping QR code. This undoubtedly also costs a TON of money since it was a super bowl ad, however, the production could have been done in about 10 minutes by a video editor. However, it spoke to the audience they were trying to attract — tech savvy individuals who may want to learn more about jumping into the world of Crypto.
A “marketing campaign” is a pretty loose term. So I’d like to highlight another example, one from a company who didn’t necessarily launch a particular campaign, but instead designed their product using these two core variables which helped creating marketing and brand buzz due to it’s product design.
Freitag is a company who primarily creates various types of tote bags, messenger bags and backpacks. They have a few qualities that make their products extremely unique. The first one is that the bags are all built using recycled materials. So, clearly, this bag matches the interests of those who are “green conscious”. The second is that these bags are extremely well built and can take a lot of abuse. That means they are good for those who prefer function over form. Considering this product design as a product marketing campaigns, I would call those the two “money spent” variables in the campaign. A lot of money was spent creating a product that can boast these two features. What makes these bags even more interesting is that no two are the same. Because they use recycled materials, you will find that they only carry a few different designs of bags, but each one has a unique pattern. Some have lettering, some have stripes, some are bold colors, some muted, etc. This gives the purchaser the ability to create their own unique personalization spin on the bag. While this money spent and personalization was not within a specific marketing campaign, it is stored in the products who essentially are able to “market themselves”.
I’m certainly not alone in thinking that AI can help modern marketing teams tackle the “uniqueness” variable. While it is nearly impossible for a human to write unique, personalized messages to all of their target consumers - it is extremely easy for a machine to do so. This level of personalization will have to span more than the simple changes in items like [First_Name] and [Job_Title] and instead have to pull in information that may be unique to that person - their interests, their current job needs that they posted on LI, their company’s financial statements, etc.
It’s going to be exciting to see what we can do in the future!