The Person in Personalisation: The Story Of How Marketing's Most Treasured Possession Became Anything but Personal

It’s crazy how the constant drumbeat of “more personalisation equals more revenue” has created this sense of FOMO within our industry.

Let’s be real here, some folks are just blindly following the herd, believing the hype without even questioning it.

Imagine the surprise when, against all the research purporting that recommendations increase revenue, usually said by vendors self-servingly selling the same thing, at Gousto, they didn’t work for everyone. They found that the only positive influence seen was among users of a certain profile: those who chose quickly and had a desire to save time.

Emma Travis, Director of Research, Speero, told me, “Just running a test for desktop users is a form of personalisation, or returning users. It’s the same.

“The biggest opportunity is in reframing personalisation to be more user-centric.” Chris Gibbins,

“Personalisation is not only about recommendations. Recommendations are such a small part of what I’d say personalisation is.” Ryan Jordan,

I learned in my quest that personalisation is more conceptual than oriented around a single discipline.

Personalisation isn’t a scale of one to two; are brands personalising or not. It’s a scale of one to ten; how much are brands personalising. There are milestones that help brands understand where they sit.

what I found as the true measure of personalisation – retention,

Logging into an account is just a simple recognition that a user, indeed, does have an account. It excludes a tonne of other inputs such as location, type of account, what was previously purchased, how much and how many were purchased, and what device was used. I could go on. It’s devoid of context. It’s most likely a reason why personalisation pla