TMW #193 | The personalization fetish
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The personalization fetish
The marketing industry has an unsustainable fetish for personalization. How can we overcome it?
According to the Cambridge Dictionary, the word “fetish” can be defined as follows:
fetish (ˈfet.ɪʃ)
noun
An activity or object that someone is interested in to an extreme degree and that the person gives an unreasonable amount of time or thought to.
It might sound over-the-top to describe the marketing industry’s fixation on personalization as a fetish, but that is what it has become. Since the early days of the internet, marketers have seen the personalization of digital marketing as a means to drive growth, market share, and loyalty. But over time the ‘what’ became the ‘why’.
Marketers have dedicated the best part of three decades to striving for personalization. Like all investments, there is a natural curve toward diminishing returns, which a lot of brands have reached or are on the cusp of.
And these diminishing returns are being accelerated by the shifting sands of privacy. It’s not a data free-for-all anymore: There’s more privacy regulation and enforcement; third-party cookies are in the final throes; and consumers are increasingly wary of sharing their data.
Despite the shrinking ROI of personalization, the market for personalization tech is huge – reaching $8.6B globally in 2023 – and it’s forecasted to continue growing.
It’s high time that we take a long, hard look in the mirror and question if we should even be aspiring to personalization anymore.
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Stay Curious,
Keanu Taylor
Make sense of marketing technology.
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