The other day on a visit to Amazon.com to order additional books, I was happy to be welcomed by name and the page listed some recommendations based on my previous purchases. While browsing the list of recommended books. I was disappointed to find that I had already bought all the listed items, I had purchased most of the titles from Amazon.com, but the site failed to recognize that simple fact.

If you have been keeping up with the web and its buzz you must have read or heard about personalization. It is being touted as the art of marketing to an individual and delivering content that is focused on you and is targeted for your eyes only.

What is personalization?

In a nutshell, personalization is the art of changing your website’s appearance and behavior so that it is tailored to an individual. For example, you step into a departmental store and head towards the shoe section. Based on how much time you spend in that section, rest of the sections transform themselves to display more shoes. The more time you spend in the shoe sections, the more, the rest of the store changes and finally the entire store ‘appears’ to you as a shoe store! In the brick and mortar world, that may not happen but in e-space, this can happen with the clicks of a mouse.

In traditional methods of market research, the research company sends out questionnaires, engages focus groups, performs phone surveys to collect data about consumers and categorizes it into various demographics, including region, income level, family size and age group. This data can be collected for a specific audience or sold to consumer goods corporations that classify and categorize the information to support predictions and ‘target’ their goods and services to desired ‘market segments’. The objective of this exercise is to target appropriate customers for products and services of the vendor.

In the new commerce, opportunities are different. Now, the business offering the product or service can reduce the need for specific market research services and collect data desired directly from the consumer. Generally, the data is current, which implies that the vendor can target content and the product or service to the individual in real time! Once the data is collected, the e-store can potentially cross-sell and up-sell by offering more content and products in line with your profile, preferences and purchasing patterns.

Different methods of personalization

Broadly speaking, there are two types of personalization—usability personalization, also termed as customization and content personalization.

With usability personalization, users are given a set of choices to define how they want their view of the vendor website to appear and behave. A clear example of this is myYahoo. This type of capability can provide the customer with a personalized experience and should help in retaining the customer as a regular visitor.

For content personalization, the intent is to make the customer’s visit to the vendor site meaningful, by tailoring the content to the customer’s personal tastes. For a specific example, on the myYahoo site you can select from a list of gadgets that you would like to see on your homepage. If you select the weather section in your left channel pertaining to usability, then you can select cities for which you want the weather data that pertains to content. A second example would be the Amazon.com site where a very different approach to personalization implementation is employed. Here you are greeted by your name when you revisit the site along with a recommended list based on your previous purchases. On this site, you do not have any choices on usability personalization or content. However, the site personalizes the content for you.

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