NEW YORK: Kimberly-Clark, the personal care and healthcare company, is tapping into the power of “nudge” marketing as it seeks to connect with consumers in new ways.

Cameron Friedlander, a leader in Global Marketing Technology & Integrated Media at Kimblery-Clark, discussed this subject at ad:tech New York – and suggested that many of the firm’s categories are home to undifferentiated messaging.

“Nudge-based” marketing, by contrast, is a model that uses data, enhanced creativity and technological tools to generate ads that match customer wants, attitudes and behaviors in a truly personalised manner.

In this context, data serves as a “creative lever” that helps marketers plan their strategies by understanding the audiences they want to reach, rather than designing against channels.

“You cannot execute without understanding who you’re executing for,” Friedlander said. (For more, read WARC’s in-depth report: Kimberly-Clark taps the power of “nudge” marketing.)

Beyond hard numbers, “nudge” marketing requires an improved mode of storytelling. More specifically, it rejects linear narratives in favour of a non-linear framework that drip-feeds content depending on where and when a consumer engages.

From a production perspective, it is thus vital to “deconstruct” creative ideas into their various constituent parts – say, images, text, and audio-visual material – and then flexibly combine these assets in on the fly.

“No one single asset is that important … We’re dealing at a scale of thousands, if not tens of thousands, or maybe even more [assets] over a global level, because we want to do nudge-based marketing,” Friedlander said.

“If you’re creating non-linear narratives … each one of these things can be changed to become more personal or relevant based on the audience, based on what you’re trying to say.”

Where technology is concerned, Friedlander sounded a word of warning for any marketers that find themselves constantly attracted to the latest shiny objects.

“I think we hold up technology as the savior,” he said, “and that’s the problem. When I look at marketing technology, and these types of components, I don’t want to be married to any of them.

“Why? Because it’s going to change in 30 seconds, 30 minutes, 30 days, or 30 months … The closer that you get to a consumer … the more fleeting a specific piece of technology is.”

Sourced from WARC