Adaptive Marketing

What is Adaptive Marketing?

Adaptive Marketing is the new approach taken by marketers for strategizing marketing efforts by actively tracking and responding to consumers. It refers to changing or reforming (adapting) a firm’s marketing mix to suit to the particular geography in which the firm is operating.

Adaptive marketing is an approach that enables marketers to tailor their activities in unparalleled ways to meet their customers’ interests and needs based on recorded data. It allows them to satisfy individual consumer needs in relation to a given brand. When carried out in the right manner, adaptive marketing feels like rewarding consumers by giving them the opportunity to personalize a product/service.

It’s not just about advertising, adaptive marketing can result in an overhaul of entire marketing strategies by adapting every part of the marketing mix as well as the product itself to connect more consumers with the brand.

The beauty of this type of consumer marketing is that consumers will be much less likely to switch brands, since the product ceases to be a commodity and becomes more integrated with the consumer. It optimizes the brand experience on the part of the consumer and strengthens the brand’s loyalties.

Adaptive Marketing Is More than Just Advertising

Adaptive marketing includes advertising (like social media advertising, which can be targeted with great precision), but it goes beyond advertising. It encompasses things like personalization (from Kleenex boxes to airline seating), behavioral pricing, and faster response to consumer demands. Old-school advertising was different in that it worked with a conveniently large aggregate picture of “the consumer,” who was not nearly as well-defined. Adaptive marketing turns that concept on its head.

What is psychographic branding?

Using psychometrics, the psychographic branding method can foresee how different personality types would interact with a brand and its product/service, create a mix of tailored micro-messages based on universal personality types, and bring a marketing strategy closer to the individual level.

Unlike most marketing tools designed to answer the standard questions (how, when, who, and what), psychographic branding can find answers to the question “Why?”. Without violating the privacy of people, it can be used in a good and ethical way in marketing by helping brands to define sub-target groups based on their personality type.

When integrated at a much deeper level inside a business, it can help create a bespoke marketing consistency that is almost exclusive to each sub-group, rather than a one-size-fits-all type.

Examples of Brands Adapting Marketing to the “New Normal”

As a result of the COVID-19 global pandemic, many brands have made strategic pivots in their business approach to accommodate for new consumer needs or industry changes. Today, we want to highlight companies with some of the most effective evolutions in response to the pandemic, and share how they’ve narrowed in on success.

10x digital

Prior to the pandemic, the model of our digital marketing business was already structured to conduct (really) all business over WIFI via Zoom, email, Slack, DropBox and many other digital platforms. Yet, we had to become even more nimble in several areas internally and externally, including tweaking our marketing messaging, curtailing business travel/conferences and urging clients to analyze their marketing so that their strategies would fit and be responsive to the new business environment. We created a ‘2020 marketing cheat sheet’ that on a high-level outlines how companies can take the pulse of their marketing plans so they respond to their clients’ rapidly evolving needs real time.

Apple

Shifting their #shotoniphone campaign to a slightly altered #madeathomeseries approach, Apple demonstrated how re-framing the narrative of existing campaigns can be one of the most effective pivots for a brand. A small, calculated adjustment was enough to create relevant messaging that still achieved their objective of facilitating user-generated content.

Nintendo

Experiencing a 41 percent surge in operating profit over the previous year, it’s no secret that Nintendo is at the top of its game. Much of this success is attributed to Animal Crossing, a fun, build-your-own island adventure for gamers of all ages. But, why has the Nintendo Switch become so popular in a pandemic? The short answer remains that gaming is well-suited to individuals practicing safe social distancing at home. Speaking further on the specific insights surrounding Animal Crossing, Hideki Yasuda, analyst for Ace Research Institute Leaning shared that, “It’s an uncertain world already, and no one wants war and horror games in their living room. Animal Crossing keeps the parents happy too.”

Daily Harvest

One of the keys to creating effective digital marketing strategies is knowing your audience beyond their demographic details, and choosing to combine that initial data with psychographic information on their behaviors, needs or fears. Leaning into the idea that many millennials don’t like to cook, Daily Harvest focused on reimagining an industry and meeting their audience in the middle, with home-delivery, healthy and frozen meals for order. Their approach was immediately successful, as its foundation was in audience insight, current events and solving for a primary pain point.

Coca-Cola

Adjusting to meet the changes in consumer shopping behaviors, John Murphy, Chief Financial Officer, shared how Coca-Cola is still focusing on individual communities as a strategy to support long-term growth. He shared that, “winning locally is something that should not change through this type of period…in these last 12 weeks, the intersection of what we do for our local communities, particularly through our bottling partners, and how that’s perceived by consumers has never been more important.” The next step then became finding focused ways to communicate with these consumers, honing in on geo-targeted digital messaging to share local initiatives.

Zoom

We all know that the powerful video-conference software, Zoom, has been one of the primary engines behind our ability to keep business running during the pandemic. What you might not know is how they’ve recently grown their business strategy to include both B2B and B2C efforts. In expanding their target audience, their platform has become a new way that grandparents communicate with their family, or long-distance friends set up virtual happy hours. This change, prompted by the pandemic, opened up a window to new buyer channels and product offerings to add in their marketing mix.

Postmates

When making brand, product or offering updates, the way we communicate this information is just as important as the change itself. As soon as Postmates created non-contact deliveries for users of the app, immediate updates were pushed through the application itself, email and social media. The adjustment was an answer to a need, and their approach to sharing this with their client base was effective and thorough.

Ace Hardware

Have you noticed that everyone is taking on DIY projects at home? Leveraging this insight, Ace Hardware has been giving people the digital content they need: from learning how to unclog a drain, to staining a wood deck, replacing air filters or painting a living room, their comprehensive social strategy has focused on the home improvers. Taking it a step further, linking each content video to products offered online or in-store closed the marketing-to-sales circle and bolstered consumer purchases.