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Advertising, someone once observed, is mostly useless. It is only briefly relevant to a tiny group of people who are actually in the market for a particular product at the moment the advertising reaches them. It would be so much more effective if information about products could be targeted with precise timing, like a load of shot leading a clay pigeon. This is already possible and will become even easier as mobile commerce lets companies reach customers anytime, anywhere. Small amounts of pertinent data about customers’ interests can be gathered quickly—and acted on immediately—influencing customers effectively, inexpensively, and unobtrusively. But this approach, which emphasizes timing, is precisely what most companies don’t do. Instead, they follow conventional wisdom, which emphasizes completeness. Current thinking holds that tremendous value can be unlocked if companies can just collect enough information on customers, then mine, sift, or massage it (pick your metaphor) to produce thorough profiles of them. Detailed information on customers has actually been available in many industries for years—and has proved to be of little value. Supermarket chains know more about your habits than you do! One of the more advanced chains knows what each consumer eats, what magazines each reads, what cosmetics each uses, and what over-the-counter medicines each purchases. Yet the chain uses the information just to make the merchandising in its stores more attractive. Despite all its high-quality information, the chain does nothing to tailor its products for individual customers or to offer new services in the store, or elsewhere. Although having detailed customer profiles can be useful and although the Internet has heightened the interest in building them, those who pursue that strategy will always have problems for three reasons: COMPLEXITY INCREASES EXPONENTIALLY. In other words, if you collect twice as much data, the complexity of your data set increases exponentially. At some point, information evolves beyond the capabilities of analysis as each hypothesis spurs a different question and an alternative explanation. The path to using customer data in a useful way is often less information. CUSTOMERS REBEL AGAINST INTRUSION. Let’s say your local grocery store has, indeed, figured you out. It zaps you an e-mail saying: "Hi, there! We know you love instant dinners. We know you eat lots of pasta and enjoy an amazing amount of wine. Try QuikChef Tortellini and a couple of cases of our sale-priced Chianti. Order today and get a 50-cent discount." Guess what? If you don’t immediately stop shopping there, you’ll order granola and skim milk to alter your shameful profile. The store will have, at best, inaccurate information. People hate to feel they are being observed and measured. Just look at companies such as Zero-Knowledge Systems, which is having great success with Freedom, software that lets users surf the Internet anonymously. PEOPLE WANT CONTROL OF IMPORTANT INFORMATION. People think companies have no right to know about health matters, financial records, employment histories, and personal correspondence, among other things. People simply aren’t going to share personal data with you or tell you the hopes and dreams that influence their buying. Instead of trying to get people to commit unnatural acts—and perhaps give you more information than you can use, anyway—you should think in terms of the "decision horizon." The concept is derived from physics’ description of the "event horizon" in outer space. When a star is born, the event is not seen on Earth for years and years; the star is beyond the event horizon. The same is true of buying decisions. As far as companies can tell, they take shape beyond the horizon. The solution is to monitor that decision horizon continually, watching for the faintest glimmerings that consumers are headed toward a conclusion. If companies scope the horizon closely enough and react fast enough, they can send consumers a message while it’s still possible to influence them. Amazon.com does this well and simply. With just a small amount of data, the online bookseller can suggest with decent accuracy other books that we might be interested in buying. If a customer selects a book on marathon training, a book about foods that enhance athletic performance may be suggested. The suggestion is appropriately targeted and arrives on time— without any attempt to build an exhaustive profile of the customer. This example builds on the three principles of customer information. Amazon avoids complexity because it requires only the data that are relevant to the event. It doesn’t require an invasive description of a customer. It puts the customer in control. There’s only one problem: It’s not easy. No algorithm will exactly determine where and when to stroke that decision horizon with your marketing radar. Still, any company can move closer to the decision horizon by taking three actions: GET VISIBILITY TO THE EVENT. Although it may be impossible to be where a customer decision occurs, you can get close. You just have to figure out what to look for. In the Amazon example, the decision is a purchase, but this is far from the only possibility. The event may be a series of actions, or maybe inquiries, or even the absence of an action. It could be the amount of time spent reading an article. It could be the number of times an online trader checks an account. PLACE TRIGGERS NEAR THE INFORMATION. Once you figure out what accurately signals an impending decision, you need to build information systems that will recognize the signs and respond instantly. For instance, if someone doing the New York Times crossword puzzle online makes lots of mistakes or goes painfully slowly even on an easy puzzle, the Times Web site might flash an ad for a book of puzzles designed for serious beginners. MAKE IT EASY FOR THE CUSTOMER TO RESPOND. Advertisers used to talk about the "call to action" embedded in slogans such as "Drink Coke." If you’re going to market based on the decision horizon idea, you need to be sure to have a frosty soda right there to hand to a thirsty person. Some online stockbrokers, for instance, pay to display a button on the Yahoo! financial pages. They figure that those who have looked up financial information might be itching to make a trade and know that investors can do so in an instant online. With all the talk of using the Internet to get chummy with individual customers, the idea of continuously scoping the decision horizon may seem odd. But think of those clay pigeons. When one zips by in front of you, you’d better be ready to fire. If you hesitate for more than an instant, it will be long gone.
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