Personalisation is an illusion unless you let your customers do your marketing for you

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Personalised marketing is an illusion. If we ever really had personalised marketing, then the closest we ever got to it was the apocryphal small town storekeeper of yesteryear who would know each and every customer by name, know what was happening in their lives at any given point and would be able to make well-intentioned product recommendations for each of them individually.

Most of the readers of this article will be too young to know if that...

1 April 2016 | Customer Experience

How referral marketing can navigate around the ad block problem

(c)iStock.com/Stephanie Zieber

Nothing works like it used to, things that were free now cost lots of money, and things that were affordable no longer are. Such is the dilemma of a modern marketer.

The rise of ad blocking was a standout feature of 2015, a year which saw the release of Apple's iOS 9, the launch of the AdBlock browser on Android, and Adobe and PageFair forecast that it cost publishers up to $22 billon in lost ad revenue.

This is set against a...

19 January 2016 | Advertising

Where does social commerce go after 2014?

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2014 felt like the movie Groundhog Day. Wake up to the sounds of the song, I Got You Babe (or, in this case, Pharrell’s just-as-incessant ‘Happy’), then open your news provider of choice to read about yet another social network launching a ‘Buy’ button.

Pinterest in January, Facebook in July, Twitter in September - frankly, it was a surprise not to see WhatsApp reinvented as a social assistant that reads your texts, hacks...

23 December 2014 | Commerce