Sending meatball sandwich offers to known vegetarians is wasted marketing effort at best and offensive to the receiver at worst.
Still, boundaries remain undefined with little hope for clarity.
Expedia’s Aaron Price told me in an interview that there unmistakably is a line not to be crossed.
“Personalization is an overloaded term,” the Senior Vice President of Global Marketing shared in my The Art of Digital Persuasion book. “I think that algorithmically-driven or machine-managed sort of curation is a path that allows businesses to present their best information to any customer as the first thing that they see and you can optimize for both parties at same time. We want to be in the business of putting things in front of people that are more likely to be sold. From that perspective, it is highly critical that that happens.
“The Internet’s creepy view of personalization is something that I would say we all aspire to avoid. That’s trying to get to exceedingly narrow responses to any customer base on highly, highly personal or seemingly personal information. That kind of stuff is not what we would intend to do or want to do.”
Where do you as a marketer see that line drawn? How do you stay on the right side of it?
