Lately, I have been attending seminars and webinars as well as catching up on forums, blogs, and an ever-growing pile of white papers.
Yes, I am still reading white papers, but back to my point.
Over the course of these activities, I have noticed another pastime of marketing (besides new creative and marketing technology) is the utilization and/or creation of even more buzz terms. In some cases, it is nothing more than some agency, think-tank, or marketing company trying to create something of their own.
After all, they are in the marketing business.
Sometimes, you will even see two similar terms expressing the same thought and/or idea, in which case, I would recommend sitting back, grabbing some popcorn, and watching which one of the two the industries gravitate toward.
In this corner, we have “Multi-Channel!” And in the other corner, it’s challenger, “Omni-Channel!”
Both can express the same thought and idea; however, for whatever reason, one ends up the champion — though there are still whispers of the challenger.
So it should come as no surprise, when I started to stumble (or re-stumbled) across some “newish” terms. Newish ones that I actually liked. Newish ones that I started to leverage. A few such terms are “conversation,” “orchestration,” and “contextualization.”
Have you ever noticed how much “-tion” exists in the marketing industry?
Orchestration has some rather nice subtle implications. While usually associated with music, orchestration represents the marketers’ abilities to form various pieces of collateral (copy, creative, call-to-action) into one single conversation. Orchestration is built on the idea that interacting with consumers in the digital age requires agile planning, automated interactions, and quite a bit of (data) science.
Conversation, within marketing, is the interchange of information, ideas, and interests between two individuals. (In this case, one individual just so happens to be a company.) With the advent of pull marketing and interaction management, marketers recognized that they could do more than yell at their consumers. Instead, they can pull a consumer in (through a series of well-targeted messages) and engage the consumer in a series of interactions (guided by the consumer, but orchestrated by the marketer.)
And finally, there is contextualization. While this term seemed rather new to me, I was immediately taken by it. The best definition that I have for contextualization is the representation of disparate marketing collateral (copy, creative, call-to-action) into a digestible and meaningful format throughout a consumer journey. Within today’s digital marketing, copy, creative, and call-to-action can exist separately from one another. Decision orchestration can compile the disparate collateral into interactive conversations; however, marketers need to ensure that the disparate collateral will represent the right context for that specific consumer at the identified point within the consumer’s journey — i.e., contextualization.See how easy it was to interrelate those two!?! That’s why I like them so much.
So there you have it — three personalization terms that I am enjoying at the moment. Three terms that I am operationalizing into my vocabulary.
Okay, so I shouldn’t have used “operationalize,” but what the hey, I like it too.
