That much is pretty simple. Personalization has much deeper implications, though. Ultimately, it has the potential to completely revolutionize market relationships. But this potential cuts two ways. If personalization is used merely as a means of automating and hyper-extending the kinds of techniques marketers traditionally relied on in earlier media, customers can perceive the results as unacceptable levels of intrusion and manipulation.
Privacy often becomes a major concern in such cases.
And if this concern persists, neither buyer nor seller benefits. Quite the contrary. In contrast, personalization lives up to its true promise when companies use it to better understand and serve their markets in substantive, concrete ways. Personalization technologies differ in kind from traditional marketing approaches, and often follow entirely different principles. When this approach is taken, privacy rarely becomes an issue.