Building bridges for personalization: a process view

Personalization is suggested to offer an avenue to improve marketing performance. There are, however, several organizational and technical hurdles that hinder marketers’ efforts in capitalizing it. In this paper we show how seeing personalization as a process helps marketers manage and execute it more effectively. A process view shows how the different phases of personalization customer interactions, analyses of customer data, customization based on customer profiles, and targeting of marketing activities – are linked with each other. A process analysis further identifies the key stumbling blocks that arise from ineffective integration of these phases. It also suggests which functions marketing companies can source from market based services to avoid heavy investments in the technologies and skills needed for effecting personalized marketing.