This article was published in 2026 and references a historical event from 2015, included here for context and accuracy.
- Tension: Consumers now demand personalization as a baseline expectation while simultaneously growing more frustrated when brands fail to deliver it.
- Noise: The proliferation of personalization technologies has created confusion about what truly matters versus what simply generates more data.
- Direct Message: Personalization works only when brands shift from collecting customer data to demonstrating genuine understanding of individual needs.
To learn more about our editorial approach, explore The Direct Message methodology.
Back in 2015, personalization was emerging as a competitive advantage. Today, it’s the price of entry.
What changed wasn’t just technology or capabilities. What changed was the fundamental contract between brands and consumers.
When 71% of consumers now expect personalized interactions and 76% feel frustrated when they don’t receive them, we’re no longer talking about preference. We’re talking about relationship failure at scale.
The 2015 data showed that 53% of consumers wanted retailers to recognize them across channels. That number felt significant then. Now it feels quaint. Because the expectation has evolved from recognition to anticipation, from acknowledgment to understanding.
Consumers don’t just want you to know they bought something last week. They want you to understand why they bought it, what problem it solved, and what they might need next.
When expectations become entitlements
Something shifts in human psychology when a luxury becomes a baseline.
Netflix taught us that entertainment should arrive without commercials. Amazon taught us that two days is too long to wait. Apple taught us that technology should work intuitively without manuals.
Each of these shifts created what psychologists call “expectation ratcheting,” where yesterday’s delight becomes today’s requirement and tomorrow’s disappointment when absent.
Personalization has undergone this exact transformation. The 2015 study noted that consumers were becoming “more comfortable” with personalization. That language reveals how tentative the relationship still was.
Comfort suggested tolerance, acceptance, perhaps even mild appreciation. Today’s consumers aren’t comfortable with personalization. They’re dependent on it.
And 89% of marketing leaders now consider it essential for business success over the next three years, recognizing this dependency as the new competitive landscape.
This dependency creates a peculiar vulnerability. When brands deliver generic experiences to consumers who’ve grown accustomed to tailored ones, the response isn’t mild disappointment. It’s active frustration.
The 2015 research found that 39% of consumers got frustrated when retailers didn’t offer personalized website recommendations. That frustration has intensified as personalization has become ubiquitous.
According to recent data, 76% of consumers now prefer to buy from brands that personalize experiences, and 88% of professionals report that personalization directly impacts sales outcomes.
The illusion of intimacy through algorithms
Here’s where the noise gets thick. The personalization industry has convinced itself that more data equals more intimacy.
More touchpoints equal more understanding. More algorithmic sophistication equals more relevance.
This logic drives companies to invest heavily in customer data platforms, marketing automation, and AI-driven recommendations. The technology keeps advancing, the data keeps accumulating, and yet something essential keeps getting lost.
The original 2015 study revealed a telling detail: consumers responded positively to personalization when it made them “feel special.”
That language matters. Feeling special isn’t about receiving the statistically most likely product recommendation. It’s about experiencing recognition as an individual, not as a data cluster.
It’s about brands demonstrating investment in the relationship, not just the transaction.
The gap between what technology can do and what consumers actually experience grows wider each year. Companies proudly tout their cross-channel capabilities, their real-time decisioning engines, their predictive analytics models.
Meanwhile, consumers receive emails addressing them by the wrong name, recommendations for products they just purchased, and offers for services they explicitly declined.
The sophistication of the machinery doesn’t guarantee the quality of the output. In fact, only 35% of businesses currently offer truly omnichannel personalized experiences, despite widespread investment in the technology.
The most insidious form of noise comes from personalization that feels invasive rather than helpful.
When recommendations seem eerily prescient, when retargeting feels relentless, when data collection seems excessive, the technology that should build intimacy instead triggers suspicion.
Consumers want brands to know them well enough to be helpful, but not so well that it feels creepy. That line keeps shifting, and most brands keep crossing it.
The paradox at the heart of personalization
True personalization requires brands to use less data more thoughtfully rather than more data more aggressively.
The companies generating the strongest results from personalization aren’t necessarily those with the most sophisticated technology stacks. They’re the ones who’ve figured out that personalization isn’t primarily a technical challenge. It’s a communication challenge.
It’s about demonstrating that you understand not just what customers bought, but why they bought it. Not just when they browsed, but what they were trying to accomplish.
McKinsey’s research reveals that companies excelling at personalization generate 40% more revenue from those activities than average performers.
But here’s what matters: these companies organize their entire business around customer understanding, not just their marketing department around customer data. They view personalization as an organization-wide opportunity rather than a tactical execution problem.
Building recognition that feels like relationship
The original 2015 study noted that consumers wanted consistent personalization “everywhere they shop and on every device they use.” That remains true, but the bar has risen dramatically.
Today’s consumers expect recognition across all channels and devices not just as a technical capability, but as evidence of genuine relationship continuity.
They want to feel that their interaction history with a brand represents accumulated understanding, not just accumulated data points.
This requires rethinking what personalization actually means.
Rather than optimizing for conversion on every interaction, focus on demonstrating understanding across interactions. Rather than maximizing the volume of personalized touches, maximize the relevance of each touch. Rather than using every piece of customer data available, use the pieces that actually matter to that specific customer’s current needs.
The brands succeeding at this recognize several principles.
First, personalization should reduce customer effort rather than increase engagement metrics. Second, privacy and personalization aren’t opposing forces but complementary aspects of respect. Third, the goal isn’t making customers feel surveilled but making them feel understood. Fourth, the best personalization often shows up in what brands don’t do: the irrelevant recommendations they suppress, the unnecessary communications they skip, the friction points they eliminate.
The 2015 research concluded that “when done right, customers consider personalization a valuable service rather than an annoyance.” That framing remains exactly right.
The challenge is that “done right” has become exponentially more difficult as expectations have intensified, as channels have multiplied, and as the noise around personalization has grown deafening.
The brands that cut through that noise aren’t necessarily the ones with the most advanced technology.
They’re the ones who remember that personalization exists to serve human needs, not to optimize algorithmic outputs. They’re the ones who understand that being recognized across channels means something far more profound than having your browsing history follow you around the internet.
It means being treated as a whole person rather than a collection of profitable behaviors.
