Personalization at Scale: An Interview with Mark Abraham, Global Leader, Boston Consulting Group Stephen Shaw 6 days ago <span data-mce-type="bookmark" class="mce_SELRES_start amp-wp-32ab865" data-amp-original-style="display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;"></span><span hidden data-amp-original-style="display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-heig</p> <p><strong>ht: </STRONG> 0;” data-mce-type=”bookmark” class=”mce_SELRES_start”></span><span style=" class="amp-wp-2cf7910"> <p><strong>ht: </strong> 0;” data-mce-type=”bookmark” class=”mce_SELRES_start”></p></span><span data-amp-original-style="display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-heig</p> <p><strong>ht: </STRONG> 0;” data-mce-type=”bookmark” class=”mce_SELRES_start”></span></iframe></p> <h3><span style=" class="amp-wp-9530d27"><strong> Mark Abraham is Boston Consulting Group’s Marketing, Sales and Pricing Practice Leader for North America and the co-author of the book “Personalized: Customer Strategy in the Age of AI”.”</strong></span> <p>Right offer – right time – right message.</p> <p>Tough for most marketers to get right, never mind in real-time. Yet marketers have drooled about that possibility ever since Don Peppers and Martha Rogers first popularized the idea of one-to-one marketing way back in the early 1990s. But until very recently, personalization at scale has been largely wishful thinking. Because, to pull it off, marketers need the right data – right technology – right processes. And that trifecta is rarely found outside of direct-to-consumer companies whose business model is predicated on getting it right.</p> <p>The cost and complexity of putting in place the required technology infrastructure has always stood in the way of real-time personalization becoming feasible for most businesses. Any attempts at doing so by intrepid marketers is usually foiled by the Sisyphean effort involved. The trade-off just doesn’t seem worth it. And the business case is hard to get past the CFO who scoffs at the rosy sales projections. Which is why most forms of personalization today are limited to “next best offer” messaging, the use of dynamic variables in e-mail, or the particular mix of images and text you might see on a web landing page – what might be called “performative” personalization, as in “Stephen, we handpicked this offer just for you”.</p> <p>Most marketers are just fine with the fluffy use of personalization, content to keep blasting out campaigns with minimal segment-based variation, because to do otherwise would slow the whole process down to a crawl. And marketers are always in a hurry to push out the next social media post, e-mail or targeted online ad. Complexity is their constant nemesis. It gets in the way of execution. It means more time spent planning, testing, measuring. It puts enormous pressure on content production. And it demands a lot of back-end data engineering to stitch together a unified customer profile. Nothing is ever push button. That’s why campaigns can take weeks – sometimes months – to launch.</p> <p>Until now, that is. Because soon – maybe even very soon – marketers will be able to step back and hand over the grunt work to personalization engines.</p> <p>Artificial intelligence is already beginning to revolutionize how marketing creates, develops and produces one-to-one communications. Marketers everywhere are finally able to individualize content, images, offers, web pages and video using AI platforms. GenAI tools can write the copy, design the layout, create the imagery, generate multiple versions of those assets for testing, and adapt it to each channel, taking into account what works best based on past performance, clicks, buying habits and known preferences. And as almost everyone has seen by now, the creative output can be eerily human.</p> <p>If all of that sounds too good to be true, there is another major inflection point just ahead: the use of agentic AI to autonomously run end-to-end marketing campaigns, all without manual intervention. This will cause marketing talent and resources to invariably shift from producing stuff – even thinking about what to produce – to overseeing its creation and deployment. But here is where it gets even more intriguing: AI agents will automatically guide customers through every step of their online journey – interacting with them in real-time, advising, selling, servicing, prodding, reminding, coaxing, stroking – again without the overhead of marketing involvement. Each interaction will pick up from where the last one left off. The customer experience will be completely streamlined, perhaps to the relief of time-starved marketers who can never seem to give it the attention it deserves.</p> <p>But doing personalization at scale – even with the help of AI – is still a daunting challenge, as Mark Abraham, head of BCG’s personalization practice, is quick to acknowledge, pointing out that only about 10% of companies today are true personalization leaders. In the book “Personalized: Customer Strategy in the Age of AI”, he and his co-author David Edelman lay out a framework for delivering impactful personalization that enhances the customer experience, arguing that it should be a strategic priority for every company and a source of competitive advantage.</p> <p>I started off by asking Mark what inspired him to start up the Personalization practice at BCG ten years ago.</p> <p><strong> Mark Abraham (MA):</strong>: Yeah, it’s fascinating because I joined BCG 20 years ago and we were already doing, you know, a lot of not just strategy work but also implementation. And I think what changed in the middle of the 2010s is digital and analytics and big data really came to the fore and we were doing all this great strategy work for companies who then couldn’t scale a lot of the ideas and pilots that we started with them. One of my largest clients over the years has been Starbucks. And so at this time they really had this idea of how do we create that connection that we have between the best baristas and our customers in the digital space. </p> <p>So we had a BCG back in the day, founded our digital ventures business, our AI unit as well, which is now called BCGX. And we brought together this awesome talent – human centered designers, martech experts, data scientists, data engineers, engineers with our core consulting staff. And then our clients – analytics, marketing, data and tech experts as well. And one of the first big builds we did was building Starbucks’ personalization engine which is now still part of what you see in the app and across email and many other channels bringing things like recommendations and personalized offers, and personalized customer experience to the four. </p> <p>They were one of the first movers among the non-digital native companies. But since then, and especially with COVID, I think we leapt forward probably a decade, in terms of our clients really recognizing the importance of scaling digital AI fueled experiences. And now with of course GenAI coming to the fore, which we’ll talk more about, that’s getting another leap forward. So we’ve had to constantly change our business model, the way we hire, the way we train, the types of experts we bring to bear and how we set up our teams with clients to build their capabilities. And the evolution of the personalization team was a big part of that.</p> <p><strong> Stephen Shaw (SS):</strong>: Well, and is that demand driven or are you having to go in and sell companies on that vision, on the need for it to become a strategic imperative?</p>
