Gartner predicts death of personalised marketing by 2025

Gartner has made the bold statement that personalised marketing will be a thing of the past by 2025 as consumers reject the data land grab.

The research firm has suggested 80% of marketers who have invested in personalised marketing will have ditched the concept by 2025 due to minimal ROI. Consumers have not been as generous sharing data as some would have expected, and this is having a dampening effect on the success of personalised marketing strategies.

“Personal data has long been the fuel that fires marketing at every stage of the customer journey, and the drive to find new forms of fuel and devise new ways to leverage them seems to be boundless,” said Gartner’s Charles Golvn.

“Consumers have developed an increasingly jaundiced eye toward marketers’ efforts to embrace them. Their increasingly cluttered email inboxes and mobile phone notification centres may lead them to ignore even the most carefully personalized and contextualized message.”

Although personalised marketing has been championed as a means to drive profits and stretch already strained budgets, it does appear the consumer is not convinced. There will be several reasons for this, ineffectively delivery from the marketers might be one, however the big, scary internet might be another.

Almost every week there is another story about a data leak or breach. Most recently, a Sprint contractor left thousands of customer bills on an open database for anyone with the know-how to access. These incidents undermine confidence in the ability for companies to manage customer data. If there is no confidence in these firms, consumers will be more reluctant to share additional information.

27% of marketers believe data is the key obstacle to personalization. If the fuel of these initiatives and technologies is to become more difficult to obtain, it questions whether there is any benefit to pursuing the idea.

What should be stated is this is not the end of personalisation, but these comments are directed at proactive acquisition of new customers. Numerous companies have shown that there is a benefit to implementing personalisation in customer services, answering queries of existing customers and reducing waiting time at call centres. This is a proven business case, but the pot at the end of the rainbow has been to secure profits which do not already exist.