We saw that brands have a poor understanding of their target consumer at an individual level in order to be able to achieve 1-1 marketing relevance.

But hasn’t marketing always been about speaking to a wide group of people? That’s the way Ads worked on broadcast TV, radio or the newspaper didn’t they? And we have come much farther than that haven’t we? With today’s technologies we can also segment and target consumers. Shouldn’t all that be sufficient?

While that mindset might have worked in the past, it will likely be detrimental to brands in the future. Today, consumer are expecting a much higher level of relevance.

According to the CMO council, 63% of consumers reported that they might defect from brands due to irrelevant content.

Each irrelevant message creates a bigger hurdle for a brand to subsequently market to that consumer.

Technology is quickly taking us to a place where consumers no longer need to explicitly filter out irrelevant messages. Search engines, social networks, news feeds, email programs, etc., are rapidly becoming aware what content we see and what we ignore. These automatic filters rank down what a consumer doesn’t pay attention to, making it significantly harder and costly for brands to win back lost attention.

While mass targeting a message to their consumer segments may be gaining a brand conversion from a few percent of their customers, that irrelevant message may be losing a brand money on the remaining large number of annoyed non-responders who might be on the verge of tuning off the brand. The biggest marketing cost is usually the cost of customer acquisition. Needing to win back lost consumers compounds that cost and is a total waste.

It’s estimated that the global marketing spend is expected to surpass $1.3 trillion. If the current rates of irrelevance continue, we are looking at an enormous waste of money every year. This is a problem that hasn’t been solved yet, and that’s why we see poor results of these attempts every time we go online. The current martech solutions to this problem, which are predicated on brands collecting their target consumers’ data, are not leading to relevance. Therefore, in my view, we need a new martech paradigm to solve this problem.

Let’s take a look at what the new martech paradigm would be to solve the problem of consumer relevance.