From Tactics to Strategy: Embedding DEPTH in Personalisation

Personalisation with DEPTH

From Tactics to Strategy: Embedding DEPTH in Personalisation

Personalisation’s Unfulfilled Promise

Personalisation has, for more than a decade, been one of the most persistent promises in marketing. Each wave of new technology — from the earliest customer databases to today’s AI-driven platforms — has been accompanied by the assertion that brands can now “know” their customers and engage them as individuals. And yet, if you strip away the hype, most organisations remain trapped at the level of campaign-driven personalisation: targeted offers, segmented emails, basic product recommendations. Useful, perhaps. But far from transformative.

Why Personalisation Belongs in the Boardroom

The reality is that personalisation has become a boardroom topic not because of its novelty, but because of its potential as a growth lever. Businesses that treat it as a strategic capability — rather than as a series of tactical campaigns — see measurable differences in resilience, loyalty, and long-term profitability. When customers feel recognised as more than transactions, they reward brands with trust, advocacy, and sustained engagement. That is the essence of competitive differentiation in markets where products and prices are easily matched.

From Minimum Viable Data to Maximum Meaningful Relationships

In my work advising global brands, I often describe this as the shift from Minimum Viable Data to Maximum Meaningful Relationships. The goal is not to capture every data point a customer produces, but to identify the essential signals that allow you to create relevance. Those signals, when used with purpose, generate experiences that feel authentic rather than automated. And over time, they create a self-reinforcing cycle: each relevant interaction deepens trust, which in turn yields more data, richer insight, and the ability to create even greater relevance.

The Commercial Imperative

Of course, the benefits of personalisation are not simply emotional. They are commercial. Organisations that embed relevance into their operating model see lower churn, higher share of wallet, and more efficient deployment of marketing spend. In an environment where customer acquisition costs are rising and regulatory pressures are mounting, the ability to grow through stronger relationships with existing customers is not a nice-to-have; it is an economic imperative.

The Trap of Personalisation Without Purpose

Yet if the case for personalisation is clear, the path to achieving it at scale is less so. Too many businesses fall into what I call personalisation without purpose — an activity trap where campaigns are executed because the tools exist, rather than because the outcomes are clear. The result is clutter: experiences that look personalised on the surface but lack meaning, leaving customers feeling no more understood than before. At best, these efforts underdeliver. At worst, they undermine trust.

Personalisation as Infrastructure

The real challenge, then, is not technological but strategic. Personalisation must be reframed as infrastructure — cultural, organisational, and ethical — rather than simply as a marketing function. That requires clarity of purpose, discipline in data, alignment across teams, and a new kind of operating model that blends human empathy with technological scale.

DEPTH as a Scaffold

This is where the DEPTH in CRM model becomes a useful scaffold. It offers a way for leaders to think beyond isolated tactics and instead build a systemic approach: Data that is clean, connected, and purposeful. Environment that aligns with market context and brand promise. People and Processes that break down silos and empower individuals and teams. Technology that enables automation with oversight and the customer in mind. And the Human element — empathy, transparency, and intent — that ensures personalisation remains meaningful, even at scale.

Why Organisations Fall Short

If personalisation has such clear upside, why do so many organisations struggle to deliver it effectively? The answer lies less in technology and more in strategy and culture. In my experience, the biggest barrier is conceptual: personalisation is too often seen as a set of marketing campaigns, rather than a core organisational capability.

Behind this lack of purpose lie three common failings. The first is an overreliance on thin data — the clicks, transactions, and surface-level metrics that tell us what customers did, but not why they did it. Thin data alone can create useful efficiencies, but without thick data — insights into motivations, context, and intent — experiences remain shallow.

The second failing is organisational silos. CRM teams, digital commerce, analytics, and customer service often operate on different metrics, systems, and rhythms. The outcome is disjointed experiences: customers who receive different messages from different departments, or who are recognised in one channel but anonymous in another.

The third failing is trust. Consumers today are far more attuned to how their data is being used. When personalisation feels manipulative, disproportionate, or opaque, customers withdraw. In a regulatory environment that is only tightening, trust cannot be an afterthought.

Laying the Right Foundations

The lesson here is that technology investment, while important, cannot compensate for these gaps. The journey to best practice is not about leaping from fragmented campaigns to a flawless system overnight. It is about building the right foundations — strategically, operationally, and culturally.

• Purpose: Answer why are we personalising?

• Data Discipline: Adopt Minimum Viable Data and expand responsibly using the DUAL Lens™.

• Cross-functional Orchestration: Break silos and empower teams to act on insights.

• Culture: Embed test-and-learn into the DNA of the organisation.

Together, these foundations reframe personalisation from a tactical activity into a strategic operating model.

Data Readiness as a Strategic Enabler

If there is one area that consistently determines whether personalisation efforts succeed or stall, it is data readiness. Too often, leaders equate readiness with volume. The organisations that excel define readiness in terms of quality, governance, and ethics.

Looking ahead, the importance of readiness will intensify as regulation tightens, AI magnifies risks, and consumer expectations rise. Data readiness is not a technical milestone. It is a strategic enabler.

Scaling with DEPTH

The final challenge — and opportunity — is scale. Many organisations can deliver isolated examples of effective personalisation, but very few succeed in scaling consistently. The reason is simple: they try to scale tactics rather than capabilities.

The DEPTH model provides a blueprint for scale: purposeful Data, contextual Environment, empowered People and Processes, Technology with oversight, and Human empathy. True scale is not about doing more personalisation; it is about ensuring that every interaction, whether delivered to ten customers or ten million, feels relevant, repeatable, and resonant.

The Leadership Call

The path to meaningful personalisation is neither quick nor linear. It requires discipline, clarity, and above all, a reframing of what personalisation is meant to achieve. The leaders I have seen succeed approach personalisation as an operating model, not a campaign. They start with purpose, focus on Minimum Viable Data, combine thin and thick insights, and embed DEPTH as the framework for scale.

The opportunity is clear. Personalisation done with purpose builds more than short-term engagement; it creates long-term resilience. It transforms customer relationships into a source of growth competitors cannot easily replicate. And it positions CRM, loyalty, and personalisation leaders as architects of sustainable advantage.

The question for senior leaders is no longer whether personalisation should be pursued. It is whether they will pursue it with DEPTH.