.These days, slightly better product recommendations or slightly more tailored marketing emails are table stakes. Brands need an ambitious strategy— supported by top-down leadership—that’s fixated on customer needs and uses data to serve those needs in natural and dynamic ways. Among personalization standouts, 89% said that culture of personalization is driven by their leaders. Setting this strategy in motion begins with assessing valuable customer segments and behaviors through first-party data and direct feedback, and then designing business models and future experiences that effectively utilize data, AI and other technologies.

Brands need a strong blueprint for how to collect, manage, analyze and leverage the right data to support activation and measurement across channels. Having a robust way to identify and engage customers is foundational, and 85% of personalization standouts say they collect extensive data to enable a 360-degree view of customers. Almost three in four personalization standouts use a customer data platform (CDP) to harness first-party data—and about one-third of all surveyed brands are also using data clean rooms as a privacy-compliant way to combine second– or third-party data with their own data. 

 Among surveyed brands, 45% flagged analytics and modeling capabilities as lacking. To deploy machine learning and AI capabilities more effectively, brands need to integrate a core set of models that can understand and predict what customers will want next. Testing is also moving away from simple A/B testing into multivariate algorithms that drive more meaningful experiences in real time. 

A handful of email variations doesn’t cut it. Personalized content and design must be developed in components that can be reused and recombined based on the needs and interests of customers and on the specific channel requirements. Generative AI is helping brands produce higher quality and larger volumes of content and assets in brand-compliant ways. We found that personalization standouts were 2 times as likely as lagging brands to have GenAI capabilities in place.

Personalization demands buy-in across the organization and often spurs changes in roles and processes. Half of the brands we surveyed cited insufficient expertise, and half also cited weak cross-team collaboration. That’s why it’s critical for company leaders to prioritize personalization as a cross-functional effort and encourage coordinated, transparent processes across teams. Among personalization standouts, 88% said their teams collaborate closely to execute a cohesive personalization strategy.