The Future of Marketing Looks Like the Netflix Algorithm
Every company could learn from Netflix’s approach toward personalization and social behavior
Consumer personas—fictional customer character models built by marketers—are like horoscopes: “Nicole is careful with her spending, but under the right circumstances she’s willing to splurge on herself if the mood strikes her.” Read carefully and you’ll notice that psychographic profiling is full of generic, unverifiable, ambiguous, and often contradictory language that supports multiple interpretations.
Psychographics also mask the inherent unpredictability of our tastes and the complex ways they interact. My sister-in-law lives in an affluent suburb of Chicago. She owns a piece of Away luggage (before its fall from grace) and gets newsletters from Everlane. On the surface, she is a “Henry” (essentially a millennial with disposable income), but in reality, she is a middle-aged married mother of three who now owns products from both brands because they relentlessly pursued her through direct-mail discounts until she finally gave in.
Inferring about psychographics based on the products people buy is unreliable. People buy the same things for wildly different reasons: There’s a discount; they are struck by a certain mood at a specific time; they…
