01 Jun 2024 Search

It has come to my attention that any blog that mentions advertising must do a post including the expression Does Exactly What it Says on the Tin, so here is mine. Following up on the 30-40-30 rule, why are some people so fired up about personalized advertising, while others aren’t? Maybe it goes back to what kind of shopping use cases they’re optimizing for.

Phillip Nelson, in Advertising as Information, divides brand qualities into search qualities and experience qualities. A search quality is something you can check before buying the product, like tasting a sample of cheese. An experience quality is something you have to spend more time figuring out, like seeing if your woodstain dries in the time printed on the tin. Shopping for cheese and woodstain are a lot different.

Cheese shopping

  • Cheeses are regulated and similar as far as nutrition goes, so picking one is a matter of personal preference.

  • Cheese is easy to evaluate at the point of purchase. Mmm, sample cheese on a toothpick.

  • My own cheese-tasting palate is a better guide for me than the opinions of a cheese expert.

  • Cost of a mistake is usually low.

  • Top priority: getting the best-matched product among a set of alternatives in a narrow quality range.

Woodstain shopping

  • Has quality metrics that are not different from person to person.

  • Hard to evaluate at the point of purchase. You have to do your project and wait for it to dry (or not?)

  • The knowledge of a woodstain expert is more valuable to me than how I might feel about a certain brand of woodstain at the hardware store.

  • Cost of a mistake is generally high: applying bad woodstain means a time-consuming effort to remove it at best, or ruining the whole project.

  • Top priority: avoiding a low-quality or deceptively sold product.

If you’re shopping for parts to build a PC, the mouse is mostly cheese, the power supply is woodstain, and the video card is somewhere in the middle.

Andrew Chen says that AI will reinvent marketing because it makes it possible to do a personalized, automated sales call for every possible purchase. The cost of personalization relative to the cost of the actual product goes down. This might be great for cheese shoppers. Imagine an AI that understands my cheese palate so well that it will suggest the yummiest possible cheese for me, every time. But automated, personalized communications sound terrible for woodstain shoppers. When it’s harder to evaluate the product, personalization just facilitates more kinds of deception, and public, signaling-based advertising might be more appropriate. More: Only the Polytron…