The concept of hyper-personalisation in marketing – using vast amounts of customer data to create highly targeted and individualised experiences – was once seen as the ultimate solution for brands wanting to engage with their customers on a deeper level. Yet, as the digital landscape evolves and consumers become more privacy-conscious, hyper-personalisation is proving to be less of a solution and more of a problem. In fact, it’s becoming a dead end for brands that pursue it.
Trust Erosion
Why? Well, one of the major issues with today’s approach to hyper-personalisation is its dependency on harvesting increasing amounts of personal data. Brands have been told by vendors that personalisation must rely on tracking user behaviour, collecting detailed, timely, personally identifiable information (PII), and centralising all this data into massive databases. While the intention is to improve customer experiences, this constant data accumulation is creating a growing sense of unease. Consumers are aware they’re being tracked and monitored, often without their explicit consent, which undermines the very trust brands are trying to build through personalisation. Worse the centralised data becomes a honeypot for hackers and a consent compliance risk with regulators, both of which increasingly incur hefty financial penalties.
Crossing The Creep Out Line
In essence, the aggressive data collection strategies behind hyper-personalisation end up creeping out customers and adding reputational and financial risks. It creates a paradox: the more personalised the experience, the more customers feel uncomfortable with how much brands know about them. This invasive feeling often negates the positive effects that brands are trying to achieve with personalised experiences.
Instead of fostering loyalty and engagement, hyper-personalisation can lead to mistrust and even resentment. Hyper-Personalisation Is A Dead End.
A simple illustrative story, a Dutch energy company I worked with had purchased a list of Ajax football fans, including their match attendance, to infer which of their energy customers were Ajax super fans, and sent them a free Ajax T-shirt on renewal as a “surprise and delight’ campaign. They didn’t share with customers how they magically knew they were super fans for fear of creeping them out. Of course, the result was a flood of complaints from customers who would have renewed anyway. The campaign did not get a job done for the customer or the brand.
“Hyper” often means too much
As Gianfranco Cuzzio has noted words associated with “hyper” generally carry negative connotations. Think about terms like hyper-tension, hyper-inflation and hyper-ventilation, that describe states of excess, instability, and a lack of control. “Hyper” suggests that things have gone too far, and that’s precisely what’s happening in marketing today as marketers strive to serve customers through hyper-personalisation.
So, what’s the alternative?
The answer is Omnipersonal Marketing – a new approach that focuses on personalisation with consent, privacy, and respect for the customer’s data. Unlike hyper-personalisation, which relies on vast centralised data servers, OmniPersonal Marketing leverages technology that allows customers to control and participate with their own data. The focus is on using personalisation to help customers to get their jobs done (JTBD) and drive better outcomes. Instead of brands having to harvest and hoard personal information, OmniPersonal Marketing empowers consumers to choose what they share, when they share it, and with whom.
This method respects the privacy of the individual while still allowing brands to create personalised experiences that feel natural and welcome. It avoids the creepiness of hyper-personalisation by putting control in the hands of the consumer and only using data that has been explicitly consented to.
With OmniPersonal Marketing, brands build deeper, more meaningful relationships without the ethical pitfalls of invasive data practices—proving that personalisation doesn’t need to be hyper to be effective.