Rise of Particle Marketing

Digital Marketing CyberTrends

Professor John M. McCann
Fuqua School of Business
Duke University

• "In the post-information age, we often have an audience of size of one. Everything is made to order, and information is extremely personalized. A widely held assumption is that individualization is the extrapolation of narrowcasting -- you go from a large to a small to a smaller group, ultimately to the individual By the time you have my address, my marital status, my age, my income, my car brand, my purchases, my drinking habits, and my taxes, you have me -- a demographic unit of one. This line of reasoning completely misses the fundamental difference between narrowcasting and being digital. In being digital I am me, not a statistical subset. Me includes information and events that have no demographic or statistical meaning. Where my mother-in-law lives, whom I had dinner with last night, and what time my flight departs from Richmond this afternoon have absolutely no correlation or statistical basis from which to derive suitable narrowcasting services. But that unique information about me determines news services I might want to receive about a small obscure town, a not so famous person, and (for today) the anticipated weather conditions in Virginia. Classic demographics do not scale down to the individual. ... True personalization is now upon us. The post-information age is about acquaintance over time: machines� understanding individuals with the same degree of subtlety (or more so) we can expect from other human beings." Source: Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital, Alfred Knopf, 1995, p. 164

• "As microchips continue to shrink, the commercial implication should not be overlooked: Products -- and the companies that make them -- now have the ability to remember the tastes and preferences of individual customers. As a result, product marketing will soon be supplanted by relationship marketing. The ability to remember a customer, from one event to the next, is the primary requirement for sustaining an ongoing relationship, and will soon become the main reason why a customer will remain loyal to one product, rather than start over with a competitor�s. ... To profit from the incredible shrinking microchip, begin now to use information technology to incorporate memories of your customers into every conceivable aspect of your operation. Never make a customer tell you the same thing twice. ... Use microchips to learn and remember your individual customers� needs, and you may just be able to create impregnable relationships."
  Source: Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, "As Products Get Smarter Companies Will Have to Focus on Relationships," Forbes ASAP, February 26, 1996, p. 69

• "Internet guru and veteran, Tim O'Reilly, of O'Reilly & Associates, spoke about Internet hype: 'I think at this time, we, the people who work in and on the Internet community, should realize several macro-trends. First, and most important of those trends, is that the Internet is not a mass medium. It is a peer-to-peer medium. People who see the Internet as a mass medium are in trouble. Once we realize that is it not a mass medium, we should begin to see the necessity of focusing on the right content for the right audience. This may mean content or discussion groups for only five or ten select people. The Internet cannot be everything for everybody. It is much like the world of publication. There are more than 50,000 books published each year and there are some 35,000 magazines available. Each one of these publications is targeted towards a specific audience and most of those audiences are very small. Success on the Internet is based on the same principle."
  Source: Patrick McKenna, " Internet Hype & Reality," Newsbytes News Network article, February 22, 1996.