From Friendly Faces to AI:

In the old days, people frequented the small corner bookstore because the owner knew them, their reading tastes, their previous purchases and their favorite genres. Most of the time, they had the perfect recommendation.

Being the owner, she would give us a discount, maybe candy and a warm and friendly service. The butcher, the marketperson and many other small businesses delivered the same level of service. These human interactions were enjoyable and rewarding, and we came out happy with both the purchase and purchasing experience.

Then, industrialization and economies of scale emerged. Big chains delivered the same products and services but cheaper. Smaller businesses were not in a position to compete, and most of them closed their doors. Buying experiences mutated and became impersonal and artificial. You became an anonymous shopper. The focus shifted even more to the brand, but the conversation ended up being a one-way monologue between the brand and its customer. Marketing personalization was nonexistent.

Then, the internet revolutionized everything. It brought email, ecommerce, social media, smart mobile devices, cloud computing and big data. Companies immediately saw the ROI of these marketing personalization efforts and started trying to deliver these experiences more widely. It began modestly, maybe with a personalized email with the customer’s name on it or an SMS thanking me for a recent purchase.

From within organizations, it was messy and transformative. Marketing departments, accustomed to a one-way communication approach, were now confronted with hard data and analytics. This hard data started to show that campaigns often failed, marketing dollars did not have the expected returns, and, most importantly, consumers were expecting a different tone and pace of communications.

At the same time, customer journeys evolved from being linear to being convoluted through a myriad of new channels and data points. Customer experience became a thing, and investing in it drove returns.

This digital era brought together two departments that used to occupy the most distant floors in the building: marketing and IT. It became clear that to provide a better and more personalized experience, IT would need to invest heavily in new platforms and understand how to use them, while marketing was in charge of ideating and conceptualizing these new personalized experiences. It took — and continues to take — a while for both sides to understand how to work together.

At the same time, new platforms and providers appeared. Sophisticated content management systems, analytics platforms, testing and targeting tools, a new boom of CRM systems, asset managers, campaign orchestration platforms and CDPs, amongst others. The ecosystem became crowded and complex to navigate for both ends, IT and marketing.

At first, it was the big brands that were able to start acting like corner store owners, plus some extras that data and technology were able to provide. They knew their customers, their tastes, their past purchases, their geographic locations, their visits to other stores, their wake times and even their daily heartbeats. It reached a point where they knew too much. It was creepy and dangerous. Governments stepped in with new regulations. This added even more complexity, especially for those brands with multiple geographies.

And then, the latest kid on the block: artificial intelligence. It started with big hype and as a fascinating toy but has now morphed into quickly becoming the cornerstone of the marketing personalization efforts. AI is proving its value by reducing production costs. This is allowing smaller brands to generate the amount of content and assets required to deliver a truly 1-1 of personalization.

Before AI, any brand wanting to personalize to that level would have to have an army of developers, designers and copyrighters. On top of that, AI is enabling the touch that the owner of the store would be able to provide by giving that candy or that witty remark.