‘A willingness to change’, is a social perspective on change management for changing behaviours, skills or practices. It’s a way of understanding a team’s resistance to change and how complex a change initiative will be.
Patterns of willingness to change can often be traced to specific roles (e.g. project managers) who identify with each other and set expectations on how to behave. In organisations and teams with a strong culture, the behaviours might be shaped by the shared identity of its members, e.g. “We are an innovative company”.
Consider then a new technology, introduced, innovative, for our focus let’s consider it is for email marketing. Always a hot topic. It is human nature to want to assume you have already seen it before. This allows you to maintain the impression of established knowledge and hierarchy. Comprehension of the introduction of something new has a requirement to be based on established principles, otherwise, how would you hope to understand or indeed react to it?
Therefore at first glance, you can reasonably say, “seen it”, or “already got that covered’. Add into this mix, a lack of trust, the unerring plethora of people queuing up to lie to you, and tell you that day is night, just to help you part with your hard-earned money. Or having already fallen for that one, instead, discover that the solution you just parted with actually had added benefits sadly lacking in the replacement. We’ve all done it.
The future of email technology
Consider the direction ecommerce marketing is heading. Unerringly it is perpetually toward ever greater consumer personalisation. But established email software suppliers don’t want that to be obvious, lest it means loss of market share and heaven forbid puts them out of business. Some are baulking against any change whatsoever. They deny the problem even exists, and lack of investment in it is reflected in their “tickling around the edges” with the existing solution instead of coming up with something fit for the future.
Some suppliers, out and out lie, and want the unsuspecting marketer to believe that “segmentation is personalisation”. Why, because that’s the program they’ve built, and to admit otherwise would mean they lose face, and more importantly, lose the business.
But lumping people together is just that, a predetermined group of people, who happen to fit a spurious criteria. But segmentation is not personalisation. Personal, by its very definition, is unique to that individual alone, no one else, not even one other person. It is this specifically that returns twenty times greater profits, that are available. rather than use those continuing to try and shoehorn people into a mosh-pit. If someone did it to you – showed you the wrong things all the time, wouldn’t you leave?
Consider then, searching Google for “Predictive Personalisation” and you get a clearer indication of where the email technology of the future lies. If it delivers massively greater returns, it goes without saying that, surely immediate adoption should be the order of the day. If only it were that cut and dry.
So why would anyone be intransigent about change? Let’s start with saving face. Being practised and expert in the existing software is extremely appealing to any executive. After all, you don’t want some young pup coming in, who wouldn’t have the knowledge learnt over many years by your superior experience. But 20 x ( 20 times) the return, could rock that world, what if just the new graduate knew something the old dog doesn’t? These are the figures being used by a variety of research companies including Deloitte 8x, Statista 10x McKinsey 20x +.
One of the great benefits of understanding the willingness to change is to be able to focus. Many organisations suffer from change fatigue, with endless change initiatives intertwining and overlapping each other. If the willingness to change is high, maybe you can fly below the radar and not even call it change, saving some of that precious change energy for when it’s needed.
Beware the advice of the uninitiated. Hyper-personalisation email software means relevant product selections offered to each consumer, corrected nano-seconds before an email is sent, yet we do not conflict with promotional and marketing email software.
Hyper-personalisation software looks at both the buying history and impressions created by every consumer when they visit your site. This is fed into an AI machine learning algorithm which calculates what that person is most likely to buy next. Consider your tastes and habits; If you were to be offered products you had looked at a few times, and were considering buying, or your site offered you something else, left-field instead, which do you think you’re more likely to buy?
Finally, AI hyper-personalisation is 100 % autonomous, meaning the profits are gross value, with zero human involvement whatsoever, which means no errors or mistakes, and no time off for evenings, weekends, holidays or sick leave. Further, it uses every aspect of the data perpetually, ensuring the product selection offered, hasn’t been superseded by something they bought yesterday, maximising the return.
