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

phrase, now famously used in reference to Steve Jobs, “reality distortion field”, where the hype or belief in something is an illusion of its actual state.

The varying differences in responses I received to a very simple question – “What is personalisation?” – not only highlighted that the vast majority didn’t know, but that their answers seemed to stem from nothing more than pre-conceptions and bias.

Whereas segmentation is the process of carving up your audience, personalisation is about making those audiences feel more human. You’re doing something in segmentation, you’re making someone feel a way in personalisation.

It’s absolutely one of the top pieces of advice across all my interviews with experts around the world when starting a personalisation strategy: experiment.

For brands, they feel as though every last individual needs tracking to the nth degree, with all their preferences needing to be understood, and then, and only then, can brands say they are personalising.

The three perils of forecasting results, collating results and accurately measuring the variance in those results should question the validity of experimenting within personalisation.

Where the risk – money – is tangible, and the reward – customer satisfaction – is intangible, it comes as no surprise that there is a misguided purpose.

there were those in my research who believed that personalisation was just optimisation; only a more focused version of it.

Where segmenting is an act of doing – cutting up one problem into multiples – personalising is an act of communicating.

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