Kahuna targets medium and larger corporate organisations with sophisticated cross-channel marketing automation facilitating 1to1 personalisation across marketing channels including email, web, mobile devices, Facebook retargeting, and text messaging.

A look at their current and previous client list willprobably give you a reasonable idea as to the type of client they typically work with and includes the likes of Dollar Shave Club which was recently sold to Uniliver for $1 Billion. That doesn’t mean, of course, that the product wouldn’t be suitable for more modest organisations. Unfortunately Kahuna are one of those rather annoying examples of a supplier who do not publish their pricing on their website so I have been unable to establish whether their product is likely to be affordable or cost effective for smaller businesses.

What makes Kahuna different to many of the other marketing automation platforms to which it may be compared, is the way that it uses contact and behaviour to determine which marketing activities are used, and when. Kahuna listens to consumer signals in real time unifying consumer behavior data across mobile, web, and connected devices. Customer and contact data can be segmented acording to behavioral, demographic, and lifecycle criteria and used in a variety of campaign types including; triggered (based on user or external events), conversion, lifecycle-type drip marketing, as well as consumer journey campaigns. Messages can be dynamically personalised according to user data.

Kahuna worked out that today’s consumer doesn’t want lots of noisy, irrelevant messages. They have much more sophisticated expectations regarding how well a brand should understand them. These consumers are receptive to messages that spark their curiosity and take account of their individual preferences and desires.

They have stated their mission to be, quite simply, “to replace manual guesswork with automated decision-making, helping marketers send fewer messages but with incredible accuracy and as a result, thoroughly delight their consumers during every interaction”.

Kahuna claims to be the only marketing automation platform that has been designed from the start in order to genuinely understand the consumer and the way in which they want to engage with the brands they admire or wish to be associated with.

Kahuna’s dealings with Dollar Shave club and other well-known brands including GoPro, Hotel Tonight, Yahoo! Fantasy Sports, Yelp.com, Yummly and others speaks volumes. Their’s is an interesting and novel approach and if you are looking to install a top end marketing automation solution they should probably be on your shortlist but you will have to contact them and get the demo before you are likely to be able to make any kind of decision or gain an idea of the likely costs.