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Chapter 25 ✦ Cataloging Audiences
✦ Your audiences change over time. Not only do your segments get smaller and smaller,
but you also begin to expand toward audiences that you may not have been initially
prepared to serve or that present themselves as good opportunities to broaden your
constituency.
Second, what level of audience segmentation is desirable? One-to-one marketing would have
you believe that you should aim to serve segments of one: You should know each person as
an individual and target each one personally. Supposing that this task is even feasible — that
is, that you can put in place the technology to accomplish it — I’d question whether it’s gener-
ally desirable. What does having audience segments of one really do for you? Most argue that
the benefit lies in increased loyalty and a better sense of service and trust. Maybe so, but it
comes with a cost as well, as the following list describes:
✦ Content differentiation: Can you segment and tag your content so thoroughly that it’s
different for each person who receives it?
✦ Traits: Can you create and maintain user profiles that are rich enough to differentiate
every user?
✦ Leverage: Do you want to forgo the capability to develop messages with wide appeal
and leveragability over a large number of people?
The whole concept of one-person audiences flies in the face of audience analysis. Authors
don’t create different content for each person. They create different content for each kind of
person. It contradicts, too, the basic idea that organizations serve constituent groups and not
isolated individuals. They craft value (products, services, information) that appeals to a kind
of person and not to an aggregation of lone individuals who are more different than the same.
So if the extra work of very small audiences doesn’t stop you, the lack of real value to your
organization may.
On the other hand, in some cases, certain aspects of one-to-one marketing do work: identifying
users, for example, and then providing them with their purchase history; or, as Amazon.com
does, sending e-mail messages announcing books that may interest a reader based on past
purchases. In this last example, conceivably no two people receive the same series of e-mail
messages.
Audiences and Localization
Localization is the process of making content as understandable as possible in the variety of
cultures that view it. Most simply put, if you want people from more than one culture to use
your content, you’d better think about localization.
Communication is at the center of a CMS. How you communicate depends a lot on the culture
of the person with whom you’re communicating. Thus a CMS that communicates well with
people of various cultures has localization at its core. As central as localization may be, how-
ever, I’ve rarely seen it at the core of a CMS. Rather, it’s normally at the periphery and is most
often an afterthought. Why? Following are two reasons:
✦ Ignorance: Unfortunately, many people simply don’t understand enough to know that
localization is a core issue of a CMS. Either they believe that users take on the burden
of understanding the language and conventions of the native culture of the organization;
or they think that simply translating some of the text of the system as an afterthought
is enough. Especially in the United States, but clearly in every country to some degree,
an ignorance of the need for localization has helped prevent localization’s wide-scale
application.
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