Personalisation Gap
The personalisation gap is the distance between customers’ expectation of relevant individualised communication and the generic, segment-based marketing most companies still deliver.
Key points
- Hightouch frames the gap with a customer-expectation mismatch: customers want communications that matter, but many still receive generic marketing despite companies having more customer data and marketing tools than ever [src-023].
- The article argues the problem is technological rather than simply operational. Segment and rule-based tools cannot make contextual decisions for each individual at scale [src-023].
- Surface-level personalisation includes cart-abandonment triggers, previous-purchase segments, personalisation tokens, and dynamic content. True personalisation requires adapting to complex individual behaviour, intent, urgency, and context [src-023].
- The practical failure mode is “segment of one” theatre: marketers keep creating smaller segments and more journey branches, but ROI eventually flattens because the system still relies on predefined rules rather than learning [src-023].
- The proposed bridge is AI Decisioning, where agents learn which actions across content, timing, channel, and frequency drive the desired outcome for each customer [src-023].
- Hightouch’s final article recasts the gap as approximation versus precision: journeys and increasingly granular segments still make group-level assumptions, while contextual bandits learn and respond to individual customer patterns [src-026].
Related entities
- Hightouch — source publisher and AI Decisioning vendor
Related concepts
- AI Decisioning
- Treatment Personalisation
- Contextual Bandits
- Multi-Armed Bandits
- Customer Feature Matrix