Is Personalization a Myth?

For the better part of my career, I have been hearing the same requests coming from prospective clients:
Client request #1: “We want a pizza tracker.”
Translation: “We need to better inform our customers about what’s happening behind the scenes so they feel engaged.”

Client request #2: “We need better customer insights.”
Translation: “We need to better understand how our customers think and act.”

Client request #3: “We need better personalization.”
Translation: “Let’s sit in a room, create customer type buckets, stuff customers into said buckets, and try to appeal to those buckets by creating more content.”

Let me first say, we need to stop with the term “pizza tracker.” It’s outdated. There's an entire industry around customer data management that we can talk about later. With that out of the way, let’s focus on request number 3. This line of thinking has recently piqued my interest: Is personalization a mere myth? Yes—kind of.

If your efforts are focused on placing customers into predefined buckets or constructing personas, you’re not truly personalizing. Instead, you’re creating generalized personas based on assumptions about your audience. The key is to move beyond these limitations. After all, the goal is for the customer experience to feel well… custom. Remember the golden rule from grade school, “Treat others as they want to be treated”—well, today, customers want an engaging experience that gets them what they need quickly.

Over the past decade, personalization efforts often involved implementing page-level variants or tweaking individual components—labeling these as personalization. Broad rules or triggers on interactive channels were deemed sufficient, such as changing a banner based on the user’s IP location or page history. However, it's time to question whether these strategies truly make a meaningful impact on conversion rates.

In countless workshops, we engaged in debates, crafting segmentations and attempting to categorize customers into like-minded groups. While these efforts weren’t futile and played a role in the evolution of those organizations' digital journeys, it’s crucial to recognize that the future has arrived.

We’re on the cusp of a paradigm shift. It’s time to move away from group-based personalization strategies and embrace the concept of a “segmentation of 1.” Thanks to advancements in tools and artificial intelligence, coupled with the immense volume of data at our disposal, we can now elevate our personalization efforts to unprecedented heights.

Customer engagement platforms today allow businesses to personalize and optimize messaging and targeting across various channels. Creating and defining business events, evolving rules, and setting up behavioral triggers to instantly engage with your customers are no longer just ideas; they’re completely accessible today. Striking a balance between defining business events, establishing the right architecture, and generating the right level of customer engagement is crucial for the successful adoption of the “segmentation of 1” approach.

The era of personalized marketing has outgrown its infancy. The days of debating over segmentations and relying on broad rules are behind us. Embracing the concept of a “segmentation of 1” opens up new possibilities for genuine personalization. As we navigate this evolving digital age, let’s leave behind outdated constructs of personalization (and the 'pizza tracker') and embrace the tools and strategies that will propel us into a future where personalization is not a myth, but a reality.