Today, “You may also like” recommendations are pretty standard forms of marketing personalization. Wildly common in online retail, we are also seeing this type of personalization take root in news organizations and social networks like Facebook as people are continuously being fed content that is similar to what they’ve already read/liked. However, a perhaps unintended consequence of this is that it simply reinforces a person’s beliefs rather than informing them and opening their eyes to new ideas and perspectives. In the case of retail, this means potentially keeping customers shopping the same types of products over and over rather than exposing them to new areas of a product catalog.

Coherent Path Co-founder and CEO James Glover would argue that this approach to marketing personalization is doing us all a disservice. Consumers and marketers alike will all be better off being exposed to more and different content outside of what we usually consume, rather than only being fed what we’ve expressed interest in previously. After all, not everyone is interested in buying the same shirt style again and again and we shouldn’t market that way.

In this two-part Q&A with BizReport’s Kristina Knight, James discusses the problem with traditional forms of marketing personalization and how retailers can start refocusing their email strategy to serve up content consumers actually want to engage with – and that builds long-term customer loyalty.

Part I – Is personalization bad for business?

http://www.bizreport.com/2017/08/is-personalization-bad-for-business.html

Part II – Brands: This is where you should experiment with personalization

http://www.bizreport.com/2017/09/brands-this-is-where-you-should-experiment-with-personalizat.html

Also published on Medium.