Personalized: Customer Strategy in the Age of AI

In a world where consumers expect more--instantly, seamlessly, and the way they want it--personalization is a strategic imperative.

Research shows that the vast majority of consumers want personalized experiences, and a select few companies are rising to the challenge. These personalization leaders build trusted relationships with millions of customers across channels and engage with them at every step throughout their journey. They are rethinking their operations and unleashing the creativity of their teams--combined with the power of AI and technology--to fine-tune each successive interaction, delighting customers in the process.

Most companies, though, are not doing personalization well, leading to wasted money, squandered effort, and missed expectations. To be done effectively, personalization must be a critical element of your organization’s strategy.

Personalized is a playbook to deliver true personalization at scale. In this book, Boston Consulting Group’s Mark Abraham and Harvard Business School’s David C. Edelman describe the Five Promises of Personalization that companies must live up to:

• Empower Me: Understand each customer’s unique needs and decide how to best help them.
• Know Me: Win customers’ trust and permission to securely use their data to improve their experience.
• Reach Me: Reach out to the right customer, in the right channel, at just the right moment.
• Show Me: Tailor unique content to be relevant to each customer, enabled by generative AI.
• Delight Me: Design new ways of working and processes to speed up the velocity of continuous improvement and make a customer’s experience feel magical.

With detailed examples across industries--including retail, health care, banking, B2B, technology, fashion, and travel--this book will help executives learn how to put personalization at the center of their strategy, accelerate growth, and capture their share of the ＄2 trillion personalization prize.

Mark Abraham is a senior partner at BCG and the founder of the firm’s Personalization business. He and his team have accelerated the personalization efforts of more than a hundred iconic brands (including Starbucks, The Home Depot, and Google) and built some of BCG’s largest ventures and AI platforms, including Fabriq by BCG for personalization. Currently, Mark leads BCG’s North American Marketing, Sales & Pricing practice and is reenergizing the growth and development of talent in what is one of the firm’s largest regional practices.

David C. Edelman is a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School, an executive adviser and board member to brands and technology providers, and an adviser to BCG. Previously, David was chief marketing officer at Aetna and has worked with dozens of companies on personalization, AI, and agile marketing at BCG and Digitas. Forbes has repeatedly named him one of the top 20 most influential voices in marketing, and Ad Age has named him a top 20 chief marketing and technology officer.