The promise of personalisation is simple: give customers what they want, when they want it, and in return, be rewarded with loyalty.
Yet, as the conversation at our recent retail breakfast highlighted, delivering on this promise at an enterprise level is anything but simple.
This month we brought together over 40 retail and hospitality leaders, to hear from a panel featuring product and personalisation specialists from the likes of Spotify, John Lewis, Whitbread and Mastercard.
It was a fantastic occasion and I wanted to share some of the insights that resulted.
To those of you who joined us on the day, thank you. And to those that couldn’t be there, I hope these outcomes prove useful for your own work!
The consensus from our speakers and audience was clear: personalisation is no longer a marketing tactic; it is the core business strategy for creating lasting customer value.
Customers have seen what good looks like and for brands today to win favour with consumers, they have to work hard to power meaningful and intuitive moments of delight.
They must move beyond click-through rates and conversion optimisation (CRO) to focus on the human and organisational truths that separate true personalisation leaders from the rest.
Here are the essential considerations we uncovered for any retail or hospitality brand serious about activating their "Experimentation Gene."
Connection Over Conversion: The Human-First Imperative
The era of short-term, transactional personalisation is over. Great personalisation must be about connection and enrichment, not exploitation.
- Prioritising Trust: Personalisation must be respectful and intuitive, acting as a digital hand-up to make a customer's journey seamless. Poor execution breaks trust, leading to user "rage and anger"; excellent execution transforms customers into brand advocates.
- Delivering Value: Success is measured by whether the personalisation enriches the customer's experience, not just whether a metric goes up. Sometimes, the best personalisation is the decision not to sell something immediately, prioritising long-term value over short-term gain.
- Listening to Signals: Brands must listen beyond surface metrics to qualitative feedback—the "noise" and frustration—to validate if the experience is genuinely delightful.
- Creating a value exchange: Customers need to feel valued in exchanging their data for real experiences that elevate their journeys, create delight making them feel seen, heard and connected to the brand.
Universal Product Mindset: Breaking Down Silos
Personalisation must transcend departmental boundaries to become a universal product mindset embedded across the entire organisation.
- Unifying the Goal: Personalisation must serve as the golden thread connecting all functions, from trading to technology. This is vital to prevent the friction that arises when teams optimise for conflicting, short-term metrics.
- Shared Outcomes: Success must be tied to shared Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) focused on long-term customer value, ensuring everyone moves from a "session-based" view of engagement to a continuous, customer-based view.
- Product-Led Strategy: Every team needs to view their efforts as enhancing the product proposition itself, making personalisation a core feature, not an afterthought bolted onto a campaign.
Culture of Rapid Experimentation
The "Experimentation Gene" is less about the tools and more about building a culture of humility, rapid learning, and strategic agility.
- Iterate and Validate: Instead of risky, large-scale projects, organisations should build an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) for a personalisation idea, test it and iterate rapidly. This approach ensures investment is tied directly to proven customer value.
- Question All Assumptions: Brands must be willing to interrogate historical sales models. They must confirm they aren't pressuring customers with unwanted offers—sometimes the best personalisation is the decision not to personalise—to ensure customer lifetime value isn't inadvertently eroded.
- Harnessing Simulation: Future capabilities powered by AI and LLMs will soon allow teams to simulate entire customer journeys at an individual level, greatly cutting the time, cost and customer friction associated with traditional testing.
The Future: AI-Augmented, Human-Led
The role of AI is not as a replacement, but as the ultimate augmentor of a human-led strategy. The future of personalisation will be defined by its ability to amplify human-centric goals.
- Scaling Empathy: AI will scale the production of personalised content, freeing up human teams to focus on tasks that demand true empathy, complex problem-solving, and relationship-building.
- The Right Outcome: For Red Badger and our partners, the focus remains on ensuring every technological tool can make the right outcome possible, rather than just doing something because we think we should.
- A Unified Philosophy: Success depends on an outcome-led, customer-focused philosophy. We must anchor our strategy in customer value to ensure the brand not only meets but constantly delights expectations.
- Customer mindset: Success is not a customer saying “that brand has great personalisation”, they will say “they gave me the best experience.”
Rachael Rae Palmer is the Director of Retail & Hospitality at Red Badger, a consultancy that helps organisations build, scale, and optimise game-changing digital products and platforms.