Personalization has the power to transform both customer experiences and business outcomes—but realizing that potential doesn’t require getting everything right from the start. The most successful organizations embrace the complexity of personalization and focus on continuous, incremental improvements. They go beyond fine-tuning tactics and instead reimagine how they serve customers—backed by a culture of experimentation, iteration, and collaboration across teams. This article outlines the core actions that can help your organization take personalization further, no matter where you're starting from.
The exact process for building or improving personalization capabilities will look quite different for each organization, depending on brand identity, customer needs and areas of greatest opportunity. While there’s no standard blueprint to follow, we recommend taking these actions in order to drive stronger business results from personalization.
01
BE MORE AMBITIOUS
First and foremost, you need a bold and clear strategy for personalization.
Start by defining and prioritizing use cases where personalization can be interwoven into the customer experience to bring the most value. This is the time to think big and evaluate real customer needs. Too often, brands believe they’re improving personalization by sending slightly better product recommendations or slightly more tailored marketing emails. Our research shows that customers want much more than that. To close this gap, you need to establish ambitious strategies centered around making your customers’ experiences more natural, more dynamic and more valuable.
How can you make your personalization strategy clearer and bolder?
01
BE MORE AMBITIOUS
First and foremost, you need a bold and clear strategy for personalization.
Start by defining and prioritizing use cases where personalization can be interwoven into the customer experience to bring the most value. This is the time to think big and evaluate real customer needs. Too often, brands believe they’re improving personalization by sending slightly better product recommendations or slightly more tailored marketing emails. Our research shows that customers want much more than that. To close this gap, you need to establish ambitious strategies centered around making your customers’ experiences more natural, more dynamic and more valuable.
How can you make your personalization strategy clearer and bolder?
02
KNOW YOUR CUSTOMER, ANYWHERE
To realise your personalisation strategy, your brand must define how it collects, stores and links customer data.With third-party browser cookies being phased out, owning and managing first-party data is essential.Larger volumes and more sensitive data increase complexity, especially around customer identity.Customers engage across devices and channels, so you must identify them regardless of where or how they interact.This demands privacy-compliant methods to combine first-, second- and third-party data.We found 36% of brands are investing in data clean rooms to address this.
What do you need to better understand about your customers to deliver the personalized experiences they value most?
02
KNOW YOUR CUSTOMER, ANYWHERE
To realise your personalisation strategy, your brand must define how it collects, stores and links customer data.With third-party browser cookies being phased out, owning and managing first-party data is essential.Larger volumes and more sensitive data increase complexity, especially around customer identity.Customers engage across devices and channels, so you must identify them regardless of where or how they interact.This demands privacy-compliant methods to combine first-, second- and third-party data.We found 36% of brands are investing in data clean rooms to address this.
What do you need to better understand about your customers to deliver the personalized experiences they value most?
03
GET YOUR CUSTOMER DATA IN PLACE
Today’s technologies can help you achieve more scale, more automation and more relevant levels of personalization. Our research found that
while brands are using a range of technologies and platforms to support personalization, only 55% of surveyed brands have a CDP, which is increasingly judged the gold standard for collecting and activating customer data to orchestrate personalized experiences. Without customer data management in place, your ability to personalize at scale will be limited.
What kind of capabilities or skill sets will you need to support personalization at scale?
03
GET YOUR CUSTOMER DATA IN PLACE
Today’s technologies can help you achieve more scale, more automation and more relevant levels of personalization. Our research found that
while brands are using a range of technologies and platforms to support personalization, only 55% of surveyed brands have a CDP, which is increasingly judged the gold standard for collecting and activating customer data to orchestrate personalized experiences. Without customer data management in place, your ability to personalize at scale will be limited.
What kind of capabilities or skill sets will you need to support personalization at scale?
04
CLOSE THE DECISIONING GAP
Once your data is in order, you must use it to decide what to share with customers — and when and where to share it. That requires robust analytics, experimentation and modelling, an area where many brands are weak. Although 54% report having analytics, testing and measurement functions, nearly half of those call them inadequate. At least a third cite insufficient customer and market insight and too few data engineering or data science skills. To activate personalised experiences via technology and content, improve your ability to build, test and scale models.
What personalization actions are you measuring, analyzing and predicting—and how?
04
CLOSE THE DECISIONING GAP
Once your data is in order, you must use it to decide what to share with customers — and when and where to share it. That requires robust analytics, experimentation and modelling, an area where many brands are weak. Although 54% report having analytics, testing and measurement functions, nearly half of those call them inadequate. At least a third cite insufficient customer and market insight and too few data engineering or data science skills. To activate personalised experiences via technology and content, improve your ability to build, test and scale models.
What personalization actions are you measuring, analyzing and predicting—and how?
05
FLEX YOUR CREATIVITY
Unlike traditional creative workflows, personalised content and design must be developed as modular, reusable components that can be recombined for customer segments, individuals and channel constraints (file types, image sizes, delivery formats). Only 42% of surveyed brands have a content management system, and about one in three cite creative and design as significant capability gaps. Brands increasingly adopt Generative AI to boost asset quality and volume: a third have invested in GenAI for personalisation and a further 51% plan GenAI spending in 2024, reflecting rising confidence and expectations of ROI, faster creative cycles and scalable production.
Which personalisation use cases should you prioritise to test and learn with GenAI?
05
FLEX YOUR CREATIVITY
Unlike traditional creative workflows, personalised content and design must be developed as modular, reusable components that can be recombined for customer segments, individuals and channel constraints (file types, image sizes, delivery formats). Only 42% of surveyed brands have a content management system, and about one in three cite creative and design as significant capability gaps. Brands increasingly adopt Generative AI to boost asset quality and volume: a third have invested in GenAI for personalisation and a further 51% plan GenAI spending in 2024, reflecting rising confidence and expectations of ROI, faster creative cycles and scalable production.
Which personalisation use cases should you prioritise to test and learn with GenAI?
06
CHANGE MINDSETS
Personalisation demands a holistic, cross‑functional effort. To succeed, organisations must embed a mindset shift alongside a rigorous, data‑driven process that informs and inspires marketing, product, merchandising, service and other teams. Marketing must extend collaboration into these areas to deliver consistent, data‑led personalisation across experiences, offers and product development. Practical steps include targeted learning programmes, cross‑functional sprints or labs, shared KPIs and clear governance to accelerate capability building and adoption.
What is the most effective way to bring your organisation up to speed on the business potential of personalisation?
06
CHANGE MINDSETS
Personalisation demands a holistic, cross‑functional effort. To succeed, organisations must embed a mindset shift alongside a rigorous, data‑driven process that informs and inspires marketing, product, merchandising, service and other teams. Marketing must extend collaboration into these areas to deliver consistent, data‑led personalisation across experiences, offers and product development. Practical steps include targeted learning programmes, cross‑functional sprints or labs, shared KPIs and clear governance to accelerate capability building and adoption.
What is the most effective way to bring your organisation up to speed on the business potential of personalisation?
Personalization: It’s a value exchange between brands and customers
Get in touch
Nicky Caron
As Digital Strategy consultant within Deloitte Digital I support clients in the field of digital transformation, customer experience design and digital (marketing) strategy. I am passionate about helping clients to make the needed changes to their operating model and engagement model. So they can deliver the best experience to their customers. In the past I’ve helped clients with applying design thinking methodologies, setting up customer experience teams, designing customer-centric operating models and creating futureproof both digital and digital marketing strategies and transformation approaches.
Kasia Blicharz
Kasia is a partner in Advertising, Marketing and Commerce practice with focus on Consumer and Retail. She has 20 years experience in digital, data and marketing. She has worked with some of the leading FMCGs around embedding tech, making sense of data, instilling digital first culture and helping to create robust marketing organizations. Her passion is helping to translate and elevate human experiences into daily work of organizations. Her leading role in AM&C is helping clients to elevate their customer experiences through defining and building digital capabilities and way of working to execute on this. Typically this involves new digital and marketing strategies, technology (customer data, marketing automation, ecommerce tooling), content (brand strategy, UX/UI design, campaign content) and operating model components (governance set-up, make/buy/partner decisions, skill building and organization restructuring).