Personalized: Customer Strategy in the Age of AI

In a world where consumers expect more--instantly and seamlessly--personalization is a strategic imperative.

Consumers want personalized experiences, but few companies are rising to the challenge. Those that succeed in personalization build trusted relationships with millions of customers and engage with them at every step throughout their journey. Through the power of AI, they rethink their operations and unleash the creativity of their teams to fine-tune every interaction, delighting customers in the process.

But most companies 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 an organization's strategy.

Personalized is a playbook for delivering true personalization at scale. In this book, Boston Consulting Group's Mark Abraham and Harvard Business School's David C. Edelman describe Five Promises of Personalization:

• Empower Me: Understand each customer's needs and how best to meet them.
• Know Me: Win customers' trust and permission to use their data to improve their experience.
• Reach Me: Reach out to the right customer, in the right channel, at the right time.
• Show Me: Tailor unique content to be relevant to each customer, enabled by generative AI.
• Delight Me: Design new ways of working and ensure continuous improvement, so a customer's experience feels magical.

With detailed examples across industries--including retail, health care, banking, technology, 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.