Direct Marketing News: Co-Director of Cognizant’s Center for the Future of Work Writes About Winning in the 'Age of Me' With Code Halos

“Despite all the data science strides direct marketers have made over recent years, customers still appear in pretty coarse grain fidelity to most companies,” writes Ben Pring. But, Pring avers, it is not impossible to know an individual and increasingly lots of companies such as Amazon, Netflix, Apple and Pandora are doing so based on “code halo” or “the halo of information that swirls all around” individuals created by every digital interaction they have.

“Each one of us is creating a code halo with every click of our mouse or swipe of our phone, tablet, laptop, Glass, Nest, FuelBand, dashboard, or other smart device,” Pring explains. “Every transaction we make, every like we record, every preference we note, creates a trail of information—or a digital fingerprint—that reveals who we are and what makes us tick. Code halos allow switched on companies to ‘know’ us (their customers and prospects), to ‘read our minds,’ to turn the sales process from something that leaves us needing to take a cold shower, to something that is painless and seductive. Moreover, code halos enable businesses to see beyond a particular socioeconomic or demographic to reveal the ‘market of me’,” he adds.

According to Pring, Code halos are shaking up what and how things are sold. “Companies like Amazon and Netflix have leveraged code halo thinking to become the new titans of our digital age. They’re largely responsible for the demise of companies like Blockbuster and Kodak—companies that didn’t understand how digitization and ‘mass personalization’ were playing out under their very noses. And now code halo thinking is spreading fast into a broader and broader range of industries and markets where smart leaders are seeing that a new game is being played,” he writes.

Citing several examples of how code halo thinking is impacting everything from design, to production, to selling, to talent management, Pring writes, “The code halo concept is catching on like wild-fire and yet most companies have only really scratched the surface. Marketers are clearly in the vanguard of many of these developments.”

Pring opines, “Code halos allow us to see people, things, and organizations in greater detail than ever before. However, seeing alone will not be enough to guarantee commercial victory. Making meaning in a world of data abundance—more importantly making smart business decisions—will continue to be a vital undertaking.” He adds, “Those marketing executives who do truly understand how to leverage code halos will be the leaders in these incredibly exciting times when a new architecture of competition—for our new ‘age of me’—is being created…Using these halos of information to build and leverage markets of ‘me’ will be the new competitive battlefield on which we will all play over the next few years.”

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