The most important aspect of personalization is data. Data is really at the core of everything we do and personalization flows through data. Having good data is a requirement to do personalization well. On Sept 16th, Melissa Finney, Director East Coast Sales at Spotify came in as a guest speaker for our Digital Innovation in Mobile Marketing and Communicationcourse. She spoke about how Spotify has evolved from more than just a music streaming service. At the core, Spotify is a data generation and repository service. Spotify is able to curate custom playlists for their users based on four years of streaming data. They’re able to do this with features such as Discovery Weekly, Release Radar and Daily Mix.
Spotify has evolved based on how people are consuming content. They inherently believe that media will evolve from self-service interfaces to curated experiences, to individual programmed experiences. Spotify is making a bet on this and is crafting targeting programming for various contexts and personalizing that to user tastes and demographics.
Spotify builds 360 user profiles to establish strong visibility into their users. For example, the profile of a “bride to be” can be that of a 27-year woman who’s independent, career driven, enjoys dining out and of course is in love. Her Spotify playlist can reflect songs that have these characteristics (love songs etc.). Understanding visitor preferences specifically around which content they engage with most, what they’re reading about or which travel destination they research the most (behavioral data), is the insight that you need to build a 360-customer profile. Behavioral data allows Spotify to deliver the most relevant experience possible for their users.
For Spotify, personalization allows its users to stay more engaged and stream more music. This is super important for brands in general because they want to reach engaged audiences in environments that are personal and authentic. It’s also very important what brands do with the data they retrieve. Customers don’t want to feel like they’re being stalked or that they’re privacy is being violated. Successful brands leverage customer data to create better experiences at the right time.
References
Fullerton, E. (2018, June 20). Data Drives Personalization. Retrieved November 25, 2018, from https://www.acquia.com/blog/data-driving-force-behind-personalization
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