Brown-Forman

In the world of marketing, I like to think that there are two core ways we can make something genuinely personal to consumers;

1) Making a product that is something personal to them or the person they want to gift it to.

2) Is there something in how we communicate that can make consumers feel like we are talking to them directly? That is the holy grail of advertising for me.

Regarding products, I am lucky to work in high-end spirits, where we sell anything from bespoke gift packaging with people's names on it to selling someone a specific Barrel that is bottled with whatever name they want. Quite the opposite of a brand like Coke which can print millions of labels with cities or people's names on them, if you buy one of our Barrels, you're only going to get about 140 bottles, so if you're a customer or consumer, you're getting a pretty limited and exceptional product.

“Moving From Print and TV into The Universe of Digital has Seen us Battle with Tens of Thousands of Messages Daily”

As you move into communication, we see how Marktech has evolved and how we can engage with our consumers. Over the last ten years, people have been spoiled with ways to receive media; moving from print and tv into the universe of Digital has seen us battle with tens of thousands of messages daily.

The secret to penetrating them is with Salient marketing campaigns that speak to your audience; where it gets personal is how they target you. We can now send an ad to someone who has only thought about googling it, which brings a level of personalisation that doesn't need to spell out on the pack - this is a product for you! How many times have you been on Instagram, and suddenly, something pops up, and you think, I need that! Now with Omnichannel, new ways to enter commerce and combining the consumer journey, we have hit a whole new way of personalising the shopping experience.

So, the personalisation that you put on your label is one thing, and it's a pretty easy win, but the exciting thing is we live in a world where we all get such personalised shopping experiences every day, and it's just normal.

So what's next? Where does Personalisation go from here? It goes into further hyper-personalisation, bringing experience, product, content and customer engagement into a seamless journey that we will no doubt take for granted. But remember, you can always come and get a very personal, limited-edition bottle from us and drink it any way you want.