Symphony

Note: Sorry for being a day late this weekend. Between Shoptalk and DTSki this week, we needed a few hours of rest at some point. Turns out, that was Saturday morning.

I’ve often thought about personalization like a symphony: You have all these different sections—the strings, the brass, the woodwinds, the percussion—and depending how you layer them together, you can end up with incredibly different results. 

And maybe most importantly: the sounds can come together to form something that sort of overwhelms you.

This metaphor—especially the last part—came back to me this week, because one of the big conversation topics for me at Shoptalk was personalization. There was a lot of general talk about Generative AI and how it might finally deliver on the promise of personalization, but I also ended up having a number of conversations where folks told me that they weren’t even thinking of doing stuff that has felt “basic” on the technology side for a long time. 

It’s not that people are opposed to it or even scared of it; they’re just not thinking about it too much. And I can’t help but wonder: What do we mean by personalization? 

It is one of those words that has taken on such a broad set of meanings that it is almost overwhelming. What aspect of personalization? Which channel? For whom? How? Off of behavior? Off of surveys? You end up with a decision paralysis of sorts and are staring at what feels like an overwhelming amount of work.

What I’m curious about is whether that’s actually the case for folks. 

The reason, I think, I’ve thought about this symphony metaphor before is that not being able to isolate those layers or understand the composition of each layer is overwhelming. It becomes hard to understand why someone might have been served a particular experience if you don’t understand the components (or can’t isolate the components), which might, if things look (or, in the case of our metaphor, sound) off can cause a good amount of distrust in doing more.

A layering system can be a solution to that situation, and it can also make things easier to understand and build from. You don’t have to do everything all at once. You can learn how one thing plays for your customers, then how another plays for your customer. Maybe they both sound good in isolation, so maybe you try combining them.

If that combination ends up not sounding good, you know how to stop. And if it does end up sounding good, you have license to continue. 

This part is cool to me, because it encourages awareness for the customer (sort of in the way that Drew was talking about last week), and it also lets you get creative in terms of how slow or fast you want to play.

Maybe that’s all just theoretical (or metaphorical, really), and it’s just a technology-side view of the promise of personalization. That promise, by the way, has been around as long as ecommerce (and save for some outliers, it’s basically remained just a promise). But maybe just starting to understand what personalization is—and what value each of its components actually delivers—is a good place to start.

If you have thoughts or ideas about how we should be using personalizations, why you are or are not, and where you think the value lies here, I’d love to hear from you! Either comment or email us back with thoughts.