Are the marketing trends that everyone is talking about all they’re cracked up to be? We’ve stress tested them to see if you should be following them, or doing things a different way in 2025. In this series we look at the top five marketing trends – read on for Trend #3 and then visit our Food For Thought page for the rest of the series.
Trend 3: Personalisation at scale
Brands will look for new opportunities to personalise the buyer’s journey at scale. As data analytics and AI technologies advance, marketers and businesses will look to leverage data from multiple touchpoints to create hyper-personalised content, product recommendations and more, with the objective of fostering deeper connections with their audience.
Stress-test result: Personalisation is like the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow, always out of reach
Messaging that’s perfectly crafted for each unique consumer, comprehensively understanding their needs and challenges while reaching them at the right time and on the right platform, has been considered the Holy Grail for marketers for some time. Attend any marketing conference and you’ll hear the phrase ‘personalisation at scale’ dozens of times, but there’s a problem—it’s almost impossible to achieve.
Delivering genuine personalised experiences is incredibly hard, and it’s made even harder by the huge investment required in technology, people and data. For all but the biggest brands, this is a very high barrier.
Even for businesses armed with huge amounts of data, this information isn’t always accurate anyway. For example, a study conducted by MIT and Melbourne Business School found that gender targeting was accurate just 42.3% of the time, while age targeting was accurate between 4% and 44% of the time.
Further to this, Professor Nico Neumann and HP partnered to replicate this study for tech B2B. The study found that the targeting of IT decision makers via third-party data was just 14.3% accurate, falling to 7.5% in the case of senior IT decision markers. This highlights the importance of acquiring more robust first-party data, but collecting enough to make statistically significant decisions is unlikely for the vast majority of organisations.
It’s a controversial opinion, but we don’t think hyper-personalisation is the be-all and end-all. The focus on hyper-personalisation has become so pervasive that it’s often at the expense of core marketing fundamentals. The notion that personalisation alone will drive loyalty and engagement is false, and we risk over-segmenting audiences and creating isolated, fragmented experiences for the consumer.
“It’s relevance, not personalisation, that really matters—highly personalised and irrelevant simply won’t cut it.” – Lisa Wood
More often than not, the best ad for one audience is the best ad for all audiences. Segmentation is only valuable if there are distinct differences within your target audience, and the more granular approach you take to segmentation the smaller the total market gets, reducing its value and limiting the potential ROI of marketing campaigns.
Personalisation can be powerful if done right but, ultimately, technology, media habits and consumer behaviour are changing too quickly for marketers to keep up, and attempting to do so is often a distraction from getting the basics right, such as building front of mind presence and perceived value in the mind of your target market.
Key takeaways
1. Acquiring enough data to implement personalisation effectively is almost impossible for most brands.
2. The accuracy of third-party data, often used by organisations to execute personalised marketing, has been shown by studies to be frequently inaccurate.
3. Too much focus on hyper-personalisation can distract marketers from making sure the basics are done right.
