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

“You can’t say something as simple as if we were to get a modest 10 per cent improvement in that segment, how much extra money is that?” Laja continued.

Those milestones are famously called, from the left to the right: one-to-all, one-to-many, one-to-few and one-to-one.

One can’t help but think what is the cost of this? This was an experiment that ran for 12 months

The way to overcome this treasure-hoarding, I think, is three-fold: 1) Purpose 2) Experiment 3) Retention

they saw a steady improvement in these metrics, which provided a strong enough signal that they would eventually succeed. As such, they kept “doubling down” on personalisation, assuming that the correlation to retention was real. All of its subsequent proxy metrics were improving, so it made sense to believe this. It wasn’t until 10 years later tha

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.

“Many people are against personalisation when the goal is to persuade. It’s a force for evil rather than good. It needs to be reinvented because right now, it’s seen as manipulative. If you want to manipulate people, you personalise.” Dr Paul Marsden,

Really, it’s one. The anomaly within these three is the point of offering discounts. It feels overly specific and biased because who doesn’t want to save money?

When there are multiple AB tests designed to attribute one single programme, you get what Stephen Pavlovich, CEO Conversion.com,7 calls “Fuzz”. “I’d be hesitant on grouping together multiple experiments and adding up the impact,” Pavlovich said.