Gartner predicts that personalisation will fail to make return on investment (ROI) due to customers’ growing reluctance to share data, poor data management or both.
Indeed, 27% of marketeers believe data is the key obstacle to personalisation, highlighting their weaknesses in data collection, integration and protection.
“Personal data has long been the fuel that fires marketing at every stage of the customer journey, and the drive to find new forms of fuel and devise new ways to leverage them seems to be boundless,” said Charles Golvin, Senior Director Analyst in the Gartner for Marketers practice.
He added, “However, this quest has failed to meet marketers’ ambitions and, in some cases, has backfired, as consumers both directly and indirectly reject brands’ overtures.”
Lower trust
Marketers face other barriers regarding personalisation including the continuing decline in consumers’ trust, increased scrutiny by regulators and tracking barriers erected by tech companies. While personalisation accounts for 14% of the marketing budget, more than 25% of marketing leaders cite technology as a major hurdle.
“Consumers have developed an increasingly jaundiced eye toward marketers’ efforts to embrace them,” said Golvin.
“Their increasingly cluttered email inboxes and mobile phone notification centres may lead them to ignore even the most carefully personalised and contextualised message. Marketers must really adopt the basics when it comes to test and learn before investing in personalization technology and new tactics.”
Recommendations for marketing leaders to assess their efforts, include:
• Use a pilot or proof of concept with a vendor before investing in a personalisation tool. Go back to the basics and test tailored recommendations at the segment level to avoid unnecessary or premature investment in a personalisation engine.
• Grow personalisation efforts from a set of tactics or tools to a capability through strategic planning, develoing use cases and consent management as part of a personalisation roadmap.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to align personaliaation efforts and increase momentum. Sharing control of efforts can lead to shared insight and expand collective impact and ROI.
Other key predictions that marketeers should heed are:
By 2023, chief marketing officer (CMO) budget allocation on influencer marketing will decrease by a third as consumers continue to lose trust in brands and entities they don’t personally know.
• By 2024, artificial intelligence identification of emotions will influence more than half of the online advertisements you see.
• By 2022, 25% of marketing departments will have a dedicated behavioral scientist or ethnographer as part of their full-time staff.
• In 2023, one-third of all brand public relations disasters will result from data ethics failures.