The importance and necessity of hyper-personalisation

Recent years have seen an increased focus on hyper personalisation, as companies come to recognise the pivotal role that contouring the experience to individual consumers will play in their future success. Mere personalisation is no longer enough for customers who have come to expect companies to tailor products, services and experiences to their unique needs, rather than being shunted into customer segments based on broad categories needs and generic profiles.

Research shows that customers value a more personal and individualised approach rather than ‘mass- personalised’ experiences and are likely to react positively and respond to campaigns that are directly targeted to them. Consumers are becoming increasingly decisive and demanding, and expect brands to accommodate and cater to those demands. The time in which companies can rely on old-school methods of mass marketing and arbitrary segmentation are coming to an end. Brands have long been coaching consumers to embrace their uniqueness and in one way or another, have it their way. Now consumers are becoming to expect and feel entitled to this new era of personalisation; hyper-personalisation. Brands that fail to identify, anticipate and personalise will quickly find themselves left out in the cold.

So what exactly is hyper personalisation and how does it work?

Hyper personalisation utilises and analyses historical and real-time data relating to customer behaviour and actions to infer intent, needs and wants and subsequently inform how brands engage and communicate with customers in order to provide a more personalised experience. This in turn can create better customer loyalty and engagement with customers [1]. Data points such as location, demographics, browsing history and purchase decisions can inform the creation of unique customer profiles that consider individual wants, needs and pain points to guide the hyper-personalisation of advertising, content, product recommendations and offers based on those unique preferences.

How is hyper-personalisation being used?

Depending on your industry and the accessible data, there are many potential opportunities and approaches to leverage hyper personalisation across various customer touch points. A high profile use-case for most customers will be personalising recommendations to customers using their unique browsing patterns and search history. Many industries have already begun to use hyper personalised recommendations to satisfy their customers needs and increase engagement, including e-commerce retailers, marketing, content producers and even the music industry. These industries are benefiting from using AI to recommend products, services, offers and content to their customers that are shaped by their personal choices and preferences and building a unique customer experience with each individual.

Hyper personalisation is also making an impact in the financial industry, being used by companies who offer credit scoring services to gain a deeper understanding of individuals which allows them to create a more accurate representation of each individual's circumstance, their creditworthiness and their ability to service loan payments [2]. The traditional way of segmenting people into vast impersonal groups resulted in inaccuracy relating to an individual's ability to pay back loans and unfair penalisation which may result in worthy individuals being rejected for loans.

As an industry, Marketing has enthusiastically pursued hyper personalisation and the promise of the ability of having one-to-one conversations and engagements with customers and potential customers as a game-changer. Marketers have been using AI to deliver highly personalised, targeted campaigns to improve communication with prospecting and current customers/clients. They use AI to gather vast amounts o