Chris Daly
Chief Executive, Chartered Institute of Marketing
Hyper-personalisation allows modern retailers and marketers to boost sales and the customer experience through tailored offers based on insights and analysis.
From streamed TV to grocery shopping, we’re presented what the brand believes are its most attractive and relevant offerings.
It’s not rocket science and it’s not particularly new. From the bar where “everyone knows your name” to the bank that is “by your side,” brands have long known the importance of understanding what you really need. Indeed, most of us expect personalised interactions, and get frustrated when this doesn’t happen. But where does personal service tip over into privacy invasion? And who sets these standards?
As the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM), we’ve set best practice and support in sales and marketing since 1911, a time before self-service and supermarkets, when every purchase was a personal request to the shopkeeper. Today, that knowledge resides not with a real person, but in powerful databases processed by AI technologies. Ideally, the application of these insights should be overseen by professionally certified marketers who understand the law, but that is not always the case.
The future of shopping isn’t
just digital—it’s deeply personal.
Unlock Loyalty: Mastering Personalisation in the Age of Millions
Personalisation and policing best practice is relatively easy to facilitate for brands with a small customer base – it becomes much harder for those with millions of customers. Professional marketers understand that personalisation is a spectrum with different degrees of content tailoring, from one-to-one offers to mass marketing. Across that spectrum, varied approaches, best practices, and regulations apply. It’s a confusing space and there are severe consequences for getting it wrong. Retailers and brands can not only suffer reputational damage and lose customer trust, but they can also face fines of up to 4% of their global turnover.
In a world flooded with options and noise, hyper-personalisation is a powerful approach that offers benefits for both customers and brands. However, this power must be wielded responsibly and ethically, guided by best practices in marketing.
The future of shopping isn’t just digital—it’s deeply personal, and it demands a serious and professional commitment from businesses and marketers to deliver value, build trust and loyalty, and avoid the significant pitfalls of getting it wrong.
