The difference between personal and personalised

By Molly Flatt

It’s one of our lovely Engagement Director James Whatley‘s favourite mantras: be personal, not personalised.

We recently received a bit of word of mouth that demonstrates the difference perfectly. Having been invited to our Gumtree meetup to feedback on the new face of the site, blogger Basheera Khan wrote a post about the experience – and an “entirely unexpected” touch that “totally made my day”.

A hand-written note, and a bar of gluten-free chocolate.

Read Basheera’s post to understand the context, but the message here is: you don’t need extravagant surprises, or slick presents, or URLs printed on VIP invites, to connect with people. That’s being personalised. What you need is a little something that has taken listening, thoughtfulness and actual human input. That’s personal.

It’s a subtle difference, but an essential one. Got any good examples yourself?

Like this?

Brought into the world on Monday, May 10th, 2010 and filed under 1000thoughts, Events, Offline/Online.

  • http://blog.suretomeet.com CliffAllen

    This is in keeping with the one-to-one marketing concept of “treat different customers differently.” It's easier – and more economical – to offer customers options to select from than creating a product for someone from scratch.

    The extra benefit is that customers who choose the same options can sometimes become a new market segment. It's also much easier to get those customers together (online or face-to-face) and form a community.

  • mollyflatt

    It's also simpler than that. Just being personal. Seeing people as individuals not customers. Dashing off a hand-written note rather than typing an email. Using your human common sense.

  • http://blog.suretomeet.com CliffAllen

    True, a handwritten note with unique text conveys a lot of individual attention.

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