Navigating the personalization gap: a field guide (updated: 2019)
By: Jeffrey Macintyre
Tags: Strategy, Personalization, Product Management, Recommender Systems, Bots

What follows below are some provisional resources with that goal.

First, working definitions of personalization that accounts for the many different facets of personalized digital experience.

of personalization that accounts for the many different facets of personalized digital experience. Second, a list of software vendors actively touting personalization solutions.

actively touting personalization solutions. Third, a loose evolutionary framework for thinking about the level of impact (and investment) you may choose to make in a personalization effort. Again, this speaks to where you sit, within the have or have-less camps, but I think this framework accommodates both.

for thinking about the level of impact (and investment) you may choose to make in a personalization effort. Again, this speaks to where you sit, within the have or have-less camps, but I think this framework accommodates both. Fourth, a few companion models from secondary sources, also looking to frame differences in organizational maturity, complexity, or level of effort in personalization.

My hope in sharing this thinking and research is two-fold:

That folks can self-direct their personalization efforts with greater confidence, having looked at the landscape this way and through the lens of these materials. That others in turn will help deepen its value and utility over time by sharing their own contributions. By all means, send me the resources, insights and tools you’ve found valuable.

Ultimately, I’m hoping to see more learnings more widely, candidly and consistently circulated as a result of sharing mine. We’ll get a proper playbook yet.

1. What is personalization?

As a practitioner, you can infer a lot from how people define personalization.

At first blush, there’s a surprising, fairly dispiriting range of answers, which reveals the true breadth and reach of interest in the topic. Where they place the emphasis tends to carry a “tell,” in my experience: do they focus on rote mechanics, on technology, on sales settings, on content? Each of these belies a slight or considerable bias, perhaps a blind spot, and may be a view to the limits of their expertise or areas of focus in personalization work.

Here are a few definitions I do like:

Personalization manages an interactive conversation of optimized content relevant to the customer journey. —Zimm Zimmermann, Merkle Personalization technology enables the dynamic insertion,

customization or suggestion of content in any format that is relevant to

the individual user, based on the user’s implicit behaviour and

preferences, and explicitly given details. —James Doman Personalization, in the context of a relevance product, means adding user-specific signals on top of all the other signals to make your product much more relevant. —Nikhil Dandekar, Quora Personalization is the act of dynamically curating experiences to each individual and context in a seamless manner across channels. —Scott Tieman, Xavier Cimino, Irwin Lim, Jeriad Zoghby, Accenture

I don’t have mine today to offer up in part because I think this range does the job. Sure, I’d prefer something singular and pithy that also gives some explanatory depth on the range of emerging tech and channels that rely on, augment or are augmented by personalization, but maybe you might have an addition to suggest?

4 factors toward a richer definition of personalization

Until we have a definition of personalization that encompasses and fits for

customization; the distinct, standalone subject matter domain it supports (here I’m thinking of learning, commerce, and varied modes of content consumption—the lattermost inclusive of UX for skimming and diving, leaning in and leaning back); context (e.g., location and device usage); and especially the number of possible product or user interface endpoints (e.g., inclusive of notifications, bots, recommenders, voice, AR/VR, and AI)

…we will have ultimately underserved and -scoped the full reach and directional impact of personalization. These are some of the key factors to determining what I call (and will elaborate upon another time as) personalized product opportunity.

Sooner than later, we need to get to a holistic higher ground in our understanding of the technology and practice of personalized experience. Anecdotally, this issue presents as the key limiting effect on the way personalization programs are typically executed today—and probably responsible for many program failures.

2. Who is offering personalization products and services today?

(A preliminary list. Contribute to improve.)

This list began as a way for me to orient myself in research on recommenders and then personalized experiences for various clients and it has since grown organically through conversation, work experience and learning.

I welcome suggestions here and will probably consider eligible those organizations and brands doing work in adjacent spaces, like bots and notifications, and make no beef with point solutions versus platform-style ones.

Yusp

Cognik

Cxense

Dynamic Yield

Adobe — Target, AEM, etc.

Rich Relevance

EpiServer — Peerius

SiteCore

Evergage

Lean Plum

Optimizely

Marketo

Certona

Salesfore — Pardot

Kibo

Qubit

Idio

Perzonalization

IRIS

Granify

Omniconvert

Bunting

Oracle — Eloqua

Oracle — Maxymizer

Bright Idea

Monetate

Kentico

AppBoy

Urban Airship

Kahuna

Personyze

Apptus

ChoiceStream

Pureclarity

Barilliance

4-Tell

Rabt

3. How can I scope and size my personalization program?

There are two answers here. Consider the one I share here the succinct version of a longer and more comprehensive response. It’s a touch generalized, but again, think of it more as a compass (which way should I point myself?) than a map in its present form.

Ready? Good.

Assess the footprint for your personalization program

First, think of your personalization program as an ambition with clear immediate objectives, and maybe even some downstream ones for the future. Imagine 3 axes for locating the footprint of your program:

your organizational position (e.g., role) and setting (e.g., business unit)

your organizational digital maturity

your present stated focus and objective

The answers to this is a recipe for what form of personalization you should be prioritizing. To push the analogy, below is a cookbook of progressive forms of personalization. Your answers to the above bullets should be a fairly strong indication of what sort of dish you ought to be cooking.

Progressive personalization: A cookbook for your program

In a previous account, I discussed the following as a hierarchy but I want to credit Lou Rosenfeld for suggesting it may be more properly considered a user-facing progression. I think he’s right.

a. FUNCTION (e.g., A/B testing of marketing assets and messaging, or customizable user settings for a site or app)

(e.g., A/B testing of marketing assets and messaging, or customizable user settings for a site or app) b. FEATURE (e.g., a recommender module, an advanced search, or a behaviorally-triggered notification via app, email or SMS)

(e.g., a recommender module, an advanced search, or a behaviorally-triggered notification via app, email or SMS) c. EXPERIENCE (e.g., minimized friction and heightened KPI performance across key user flows through a personalized UX, such as the browse experience of Netflix)

(e.g., minimized friction and heightened KPI performance across key user flows through a personalized UX, such as the browse experience of Netflix) d. PRODUCT (e.g., branded, standalone-quality feature set that in itself is either (a) market-defining (b) brand-differentiating and/or (c) directly or indirectly monetized: i.e., Spotify dynamic playlists like Release Radar and Discover Weekly, or the entirety of StitchFix)

It’s imperfect; it’s a start.

To break the metaphor, this is a zoology of personalization that gets at a wide-angle view of how it is deployed and realized through many varied prospective digital (and non-digital) touchpoints. Some, for example, will suggest there’s an omnichannel nirvana at which fully orchestrated customer experience operates seamlessly, linking the CIO and CMO in harmonious progress. Higher rungs on the ladder will doubtless be climbed.

At a minimum, there are different levels of personalization pervasiveness in a given organization and that should be a useful lens for those with a customer-centered vision.

As importantly, we should not presume any certain, A-through-D destination is logical for every personalization program: putting the hype aside, personalization should not be about moonshots or pointlessly chasing the most visible innovators in sectors adjacent or distant from your own.

What’s the utility of this model? Near-future opportunities in AI

What this progression should reveal and measure is a growing level of sophistication, investment and reward.

But the utility of the model is not limited to a mental model that situates a program owner or product manager in a coherent decisionmaking framework, and to locate and size that personalization program.

Progressive personalization is going to be key to getting ready for what AI will be able to deliver in digital experiences, faster than most of us expect it. One of the biggest impediments to launching a personalization effort today is the pre-personalization lift of rich, well-structured, and authoritative data.

This model should be a way to consistently underpin all personalization efforts to remain orchestrated, incorporating a single abstraction layer and a single source of truth about its users. That discipline and focus should allow smart organizations to speed their way to personalized product opportunity faster than their competitors, and deliver experiences that are transformatively better than them, too.

4. What are some other ways of thinking about personalization?

I have collected a wide range of explanatory models for how other parties (software companies, consultancies, technologists, etc.) explain or illustrate the world of personalization: its value, its functional demands, how its algorithms can work, and so forth. I’m not extending any particular endorsement or expressing a vendor preference. Find them scattered throughout this post.

Below, I am sharing a subset of those resources I find distinctive, novel or useful—and that I think are already in the public domain. I’ve attempted to credit authors and source materials for all these secondary assets, but please reach out if I can supplement that information and provide further context or links.