Personalization is pretty good at guessing what customers might want. It’s much worse at making them feel like the brand knows who they are.

That’s the problem hiding inside a lot of otherwise respectable personalization programs. In research from SheerID and Censuswide, 55% of consumers said tailored offers are useful, but only 36% said those offers often recognize something meaningful about them, such as their job, life stage, or community. Nearly three in 10 said personalized offers feel intrusive, and a similar share said they’re based on inaccurate assumptions.

So yes, the recommendation engine may know you looked at a laptop. It may even know you looked at three of them. What it may not know is that you’re a student, a healthcare worker, a new parent, or someone who has been buying from the brand for 12 years.

That difference is where personalization starts to get interesting.

Relevance only gets you so far

Marketers have spent years getting better at inference.…