Brinker has produced a lot of other valuable insights, including in his book Hacking Marketing3 and a follow-up article in Harvard Business Review – ‘The Rise of the Chief Marketing Technologist’.4

The number one challenge mentioned in the study was ‘Struggling to understand customer needs and preferences’. It can be argued that this challenge sits right between skills and software, and is closely related to the insights side of the Bowtie of Personalization.

As individual consumers, we don’t have one relevant channel. We cannot only be reached on the right channel.

you might have defined a customer segment on deterministic data – for example, a customer having bought a specific car from your company. In this case, using this non-sensitive information explicitly will work better than addressing it implicitly.

Personalization will then enable you to create additional value in your marketing communication:

it makes sense to optimize for your unknown customers until you have got to know them. Once you know them well enough and you’ve removed most of the friction from the generic experience, you can switch to personalization tactics instead – while still measuring the effect in much the same way as with CRO.

Looking back at the Bowtie of Personalization, it’s clear that without any behavioural data, you’ll never unlock personalization that relies on the bottom part of the bowtie.

Personalization is a distinct communication tactic that aims to create better immediate and future business value by showing or hiding specific content to recipients in a way that is expected to align with insights into their explicit or inferred preferences.

First, Gartner doesn’t really seem to help us in terms of getting a clear understanding of the term ‘personalization’. Second, the direction is clear: personalization is moving forward in terms of maturity.