When personalization backfires

Everywhere you look in the marketing world, personalization is billed as the holy grail.

Platforms boast about their personalization engines. Consultants urge you to “get more personal” in your outreach. Software companies promise that, with the right tech stack, you can finally deliver one-to-one experiences at scale.

McKinsey even reported that companies that excel at personalization generate 40% more revenue from those activities than average players. The opportunity is real.

But what most of the industry calls personalization isn’t personal at all.

Behavioral tailoring ≠ personalization

When marketers say “personalization,” they usually mean:

• Signed up? Use their first name like you’re BFFs.

• Clicked a link? Drop them into a new nurture sequence.

• Purchased X? Recommend Y.

This is useful. But it’s shallow. These tactics don’t tell you who the person is, what they’re struggling with, or why they engaged in the first place. It’s not “personalization,” it’s behavioral tailoring—just reacting to digital breadcrumbs.

And consumers know it.

Gartner reports that nearly half of consumers experience surface-level personalized communications as “irrelevant or creepy.”

The problem isn’t whether personalization works—it’s how we’ve been trained to practice it. Done poorly, it overwhelms or alienates instead of building trust.

As Gartner puts it: “More than half of customers feel overwhelmed or rushed by traditional personalization tactics at least once in a purchase journey.”

In other words, personalization tactics that confuse automation for empathy often backfire.

What real personalization would look like

If we were serious about personalization, it would look less like “clicked link = send offer” and more like:

• Motivation-based
  Understanding the job someone is trying to get done. A stressed-out parent looking for relief needs a different experience than a couple looking for a meaningful night out.

• Outcome-driven
  Aligning your offer with the result they want to achieve. Is it connection, inspiration, learning, or belonging? That’s personal—far more than “customers who bought X also bought Y.”

• Context-aware
  Recognizing life stage, constraints, and circumstances. A retiree’s motivations and barriers look very different from a college student’s, even if they both clicked the same ad.

This is the level at which personalization stops being creepy and starts being useful.

Why the industry got stuck

The problem is that most “personalization” frameworks were built around third-party cookies and surface-level signals—easy data to capture, easy to automate.

Now, as third-party cookies erode, Apple blocks tracking, and cross-device attribution gets messier, that already-shallow version of personalization is breaking down.

Marketers are realizing: if all you know is whether someone clicked or purchased, you don’t actually know very much at all.

Even Gartner is urging CMOs to move away from passive personalization and toward something deeper:

“Passive personalization tactics alone no longer suffice… CMOs must pivot toward active, course-changing personalization that reveals customers’ hidden needs, validates their decisions and pulls them from pitfall to purchase.”

Motivation, not metrics

The next era of personalization has to go deeper. It has to start with first-party data — the data people willingly give you because they see value in exchange. Surveys, conversations, sign-ups, event attendance, feedback loops.

Gathering the data is the first step. And it’s easier than you think. Deloitte found that more than half of Americans (51%) are willing to share their data to get a more personalized experience.

But to move from surface-level to truly personal (and un-creepy), you have to organize your strategy around motivation-based segments and desired outcomes.

• What’s the struggle in their life they’re trying to solve?

• How does your product or service help?

That’s personalization. Not just knowing someone opened an email, but knowing why they would care in the first place.

Deloitte research backs this up: “Brands should do more than just increase the volume of personalized recommendations and tailored offers. They should explore ways to forge deeper emotional connections with consumers.”

Customer first > customer centric

For most marketers, customer centricity boils down to leveraging surface-level data to drive conversions. But that still starts with the brand’s agenda.

A customer-first approach flips the script: it begins with the customer’s struggle and desired outcome.

That’s far more personal than knowing whether someone opened an email or clicked a link—because it speaks to who they are and what they’re trying to achieve, not just what they did online.

If we want to create meaningful relationships (and not just squeeze out incremental conversions), we need to reclaim the word. Personalization should mean helping someone achieve the outcome they care about, not just reacting to their last digital move.

That’s the shift from personalization-as-tactic to personalization-as-trust. And it’s the only kind that will last.

Learn more

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