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Survey indicates personalised marketing may not always be the best approach

Stat of the day: Personalised marketing generates negative experiences for 53% of customers, who were 3.2x more likely to regret a purchase and 44% less likely to purchase again in the future.

A Gartner survey of 1,464 B2B buyers and consumers across North America, the U.K., Australia and New Zealand in November and December 2024 found that customers who experienced personalisation in a recent purchase journey were 1.8x more likely to pay a premium but were simultaneously 2x more likely to feel overwhelmed by the volume of information they received.

Moreover, they were 2.8x more likely to feel time pressure to move forward.

The paradox of personalization arises when customers switch tasks in their buying journey, such as transitioning from searching to selecting a product. This shift can be challenging for most consumers and B2B buyers. During these moments, personalised offers and product recommendations may fall short, as they appear irrelevant to buyers who are grappling with challenges more complex than the offer itself.

“While personalisation has proven to be commercially valuable for some customers, it’s crucial to recognise that it doesn’t resonate with most,” said Audrey Brosnan, Senior Director Analyst in the Gartner Marketing Practice. “More than half of customers feel overwhelmed or rushed by traditional personalization tactics at least once in a purchase journey, when cognitive, emotional and social challenges are difficult to resolve. Personalized offers at these moments can harm customers, highlighting the need for marketers to adopt more nuanced and adaptive strategies that cater to diverse customer needs, like escaping the pitfalls of task switching.”

“CMOs face an urgent strategic imperative to redesign personalization for the coming era of two-way, AI-enabled, conversational experiences,” said Brosnan. “Passive personalization tactics alone no longer suffice; they can inadvertently intensify the negative emotions that customers experience when trapped in decision-making pitfalls. CMOs must pivot toward active, course-changing personalisation that reveals customers’ hidden needs, validates their decisions and pulls them from pitfall to purchase.”

According to the research, course-changing personalisation significantly outperforms traditional “next best action” recommendations for customers in pitfalls. Active personalization empowers individuals to reflect, build confidence, and take decisive actions aligned with their authentic goals. Customers engaged via active personalization are 2.3x more likely to confidently complete critical purchase decisions, generating substantial improvement in customer satisfaction and marketing ROI.

By allowing customers to take control of their journey, organizations can create more meaningful interactions that challenge perspectives and build confidence. This approach is particularly effective in addressing the complex emotions customers experience in journey pitfalls, such as feelings of being rushed into, overwhelmed by, or dubious of passive personalization.

“Active personalization is a powerful new strategy for transforming customer engagement into strategic value,” said Brosnan. “By engaging customers directly, marketing leaders can use personalized experiences to not only improve satisfaction but also drive substantial improvements in ROI and future purchase potential. Even better, active personalization reduces customers’ apprehension over the creepiness of passive personalization. They understand why brands need the requested data, and they value the utility that active personalisation supplies in exchange.”

Photo by Lukas Müller on Unsplash

BRAND MONITORING MONTH: How to match the best solutions with your organisational needs

In a digital landscape where brand perception can shift in real-time, brand monitoring has become an essential function for marketing leaders. With conversations happening across social media, forums, news sites, and review platforms, staying ahead of sentiment, identifying risks, and seizing engagement opportunities requires more than manual oversight, it demands intelligent, scalable tools. Selecting the right brand monitoring partner is a strategic decision…

1. Natural Language Processing (NLP) Accuracy

The ability to understand nuance, sarcasm, and context is key to accurate sentiment analysis. Leading platforms now use advanced NLP models, often trained on diverse datasets, to distinguish between genuine praise, subtle criticism, or neutral commentary. Marketing teams should test platforms across varied use cases, from crisis response to campaign tracking, to assess how well they interpret complex human language.

2. Multilingual and Regional Support

For UK-based brands with a global or multicultural audience, multilingual monitoring is vital. Solutions should cover not just major languages, but also regional dialects and colloquialisms. This ensures accurate sentiment tracking across different territories and improves relevance in domestic markets, especially in sectors like retail, entertainment, or travel.

3. Alerting and Sensitivity Settings

Real-time alerts are crucial during high-risk or high-interest periods, such as product launches, crises, or viral trends. A good platform should allow configurable alert sensitivity to avoid false positives while ensuring no critical mention goes unnoticed. Look for tools that support escalation rules, so alerts can be routed to the right team members based on topic, sentiment, or source.

4. Integration and Workflow Compatibility

Integration with CRM, social media management tools, and analytics platforms is increasingly important. Marketing leaders should favour vendors that offer open APIs, native integrations with tools like Salesforce, HubSpot, or Sprinklr, and compatibility with team collaboration platforms like Slack or Microsoft Teams. This ensures insights flow into existing workflows rather than sit in silos.

5. Insight Visualisation and Reporting

Raw data is only valuable when it can be interpreted and acted on. Look for platforms with customisable dashboards that visualise sentiment trends, share of voice, influencer activity, and topic clustering in intuitive formats. Automated reporting and benchmarking features also help inform executive decision-making and track campaign effectiveness over time.

Brand monitoring is more than listening: it’s about proactive reputation management, customer engagement, and strategic insight. By prioritising platforms that combine linguistic intelligence with real-time responsiveness and seamless integration, marketing leaders can ensure their brands stay visible, valued, and vigilant in a fast-moving digital world.

Are you looking for Brand Monitoring solutions for your organisation? The Digital Marketing Solutions Summit can help!

Photo by Aman Pal on Unsplash

July 2025 is Website Analytics Month on Digital Marketing Briefing – Here’s how to get involved

Each month on Digital Marketing Briefing we’re shining the spotlight on different parts of the marketing sector – and in July we’ll be focussing on Analytics solutions.

It’s all part of our ‘Recommended’ editorial feature, designed to help marketing industry professionals find the best products and services available today.

So, if you specialise in Analytics and would like to be included as part of this exciting new shop window, we’d love to hear from you – for more info, contact Kerry Naumburger on k.naumburger@forumevents.co.uk.

Here’s our features list in full:-

July 2025 – Website Analytics
Aug 2025 – Conversion Rate Optimisation
Sept 2025 – Digital Signage
Oct 2025 – Printing
Nov 2025 – Creative & Design
Dec 2025 – Online Strategy
Jan 2026 – Content Management
Feb 2026 – Lead Generation & Tracking
Mar 2026 – Email Marketing
April 2026 – Digital Printing
May 2026 – Social Media
June 2026 – Brand Monitoring

IPA Bellwether reports UK digital ad budgets rise

The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising’s (IPA) Bellwether reports marketeers have revised their budgets upwards in the first quarter of 2017, the highest level recorded in almost a decade.

Some 26.1 per cent of those companies polled remain positive about 2017/18 budgets, signalling growth for the coming year,  while 11.8 per cent of companies said that marketing budgets would increase during the first quarter of 2017.

32 per cent of those companies polled also reported improvement in the financial pipeline, compared to 19 per cent that predicted things would be worse during the quarter.

The IPA reported marketers on tighter budgets are seeing greater value from digital and positioning ad spend accordingly, mostly as a direct result of the unknown effects of Brexit negotiations and wider economic uncertainty.

However, despite a positive outlook for digital ad spends in 2017, the IPA predicts stagnation materialising in 2018, with marketers being advised by experts to proceed with caution.

Speaking about the report, the IPA’s director general Paul Bainsfair said: “The election result has thrown further uncertainty into an already volatile environment.

“It is inevitable that this has had a knock-on effect on UK. Specifically, for marketers this has meant a desire, where possible, to seek out more activation driven advertising. As evidenced strongly in this latest Bellwether Report, this has resulted in a further move towards advertising in the digital space.”