Drawbacks of Message Personalization

Message personalization can create drawbacks for companies, however, when those advertisements appear to be overly intrusive. While RFID tags could be used to target individuals shopping in brick-and-mortar stores, the potential negative brand and customer equity effects of such marketing may not make such efforts advisable. Target experienced this type of issue when it was widely reported that they used ‘big data’ to identify a pregnant woman before she had informed anybody (Hill). An additional problem is that consumer-driven participative marketing efforts are largely uncontrollable by the company, and sometimes leads to negative or embarrassing messages being spread through social media. Since user-generated marketing content is generally more effective than traditional content, the spread of negative user-generated content by a disgruntled customer can be very difficult for companies to deal with.

Another additional drawback is the lack of standard practices for social media adoption and implementation. Social media marketing is not uniformly indicated for all type of products and services despite the abovementioned benefits to its adoption. Kim and Ko suggest that building luxury brand awareness through social media adoption can have the counterintuitive effect of reducing customer equity for branded products. Their study showed that after Louis Vuitton became increasingly popular in Korea, many counterfeits appeared, which in turn, ruined the distinctive elements of the brand. Shen and Bissell suggest that high-end companies adjust for this effect by being significantly more selective in both the timing and targeting of their social media marketing. Companies clearly have to be deliberate and careful in their decisions to...

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...s. Users are most engaged when companies are authentic in expressing their unique story and when companies successfully target their customers using all the tools at their disposal.

Social media has provided companies with extraordinary opportunities to engage customers with their brands and products through personalized and participative marketing. While there are potential pitfalls involved in adopting social media marketing, there are also opportunities for increased customer engagement and more effective marketing that come with social media. Properly implementing social media marketing in beneficial ways clearly requires careful and deliberate planning. As businesses become more knowledgeable in utilizing social media for their marketing needs, they will be better able to leverage the benefits of the increased personalization afforded by social media marketing.