SPOTLIGHT ON DISCOVERY: PERSONALISATION
Personalisation Should Solve Problems, Not Just Populate Content
Beth Hodge
Head of Client Strategy
We recently facilitated a discovery workshop with the digital, analytics and customer insight teams at Brakes to help shape the foundations of their personalisation strategy.
What made the session particularly valuable was the level of customer understanding already inside the business. The conversations quickly moved beyond surface-level ideas around content targeting or automation and into something far more meaningful: how the online experience can better support real customer needs, behaviours and progression.
That shift matters.
Because for many businesses, personalisation becomes overwhelming before it even begins. There are multiple audiences, competing commercial priorities, different lifecycle stages, acquisition goals, retention goals, loyalty challenges, operational realities and endless ways to segment customers.
Where do you start?
That was one of the most important themes to emerge from the workshop. Not simply how to personalise — but how to create focus.
Moving Beyond “Personalisation” As A Feature
One of the strongest discussions throughout the session centred around the idea that personalisation cannot exist in isolation from the wider customer experience.
Too often, businesses approach it through the lens of capability: What can the platform do?
What data points do we have?
What content can we dynamically swap?
But the more valuable question is: What problem are we solving for the customer?
The Brakes team explored the realities of the customer journey in detail — from onboarding friction and customer confidence through to loyalty behaviours, delivery expectations and the differences between first-time and returning customer needs.
What became clear was that the opportunity is not simply to make experiences feel more tailored. It is to make them feel more supportive.
That is a very different mindset.
Because when personalisation is grounded in customer momentum, it naturally becomes more purposeful. The focus shifts away from adding more messaging and towards helping customers move forward with greater confidence and less friction.
The Most Interesting Insight Wasn’t About Segments
One of the most valuable parts of the workshop came from discussing segmentation.
Like most established businesses, Brakes has many meaningful ways to understand customers — sector, loyalty, order frequency, region, business size, delivery patterns and more. But with so many possible routes, personalisation strategies can quickly become difficult to operationalise.
The challenge is rarely a lack of data. It is knowing where to focus first.
Rather than attempting to personalise for every possible audience or scenario, the discussion focused on identifying where the experience currently feels least supportive and which customer groups represent the biggest opportunity for progression.
That subtle shift changes everything.
Instead of building a strategy around internal customer categories, the conversation becomes centred on moments of uncertainty, friction and need. It creates clarity around where personalisation can genuinely add value rather than simply creating more complexity.
A particularly important discussion centred around smaller, self-serve customers and understanding who is truly representative of the online audience. In many organisations, there can be a disconnect between the customers a business strategically wants to grow and the customers who are actually engaging with the digital experience day-to-day.
Grounding decisions in the realities of customer behaviour — rather than assumptions alone — is where better strategies begin.
Why These Sessions Matter
The most effective workshops are rarely the ones where everyone arrives with fixed answers.
They are the sessions built on curiosity, challenge and shared exploration.
What made this workshop particularly strong was the openness across teams to discuss both the opportunities and the tensions that exist within personalisation strategy. Acquisition and retention priorities. Operational constraints. Commercial targets. Customer expectations. Different interpretations of who the “core” customer really is.
Those conversations are important because they create alignment before tactics.
They help businesses step back from the pressure to “do personalisation” and instead build a shared understanding of:
- where customers need more support
- which audiences matter most online
- where friction exists today
- where momentum can be created
That foundation is what allows personalisation to become commercially meaningful rather than simply reactive.
Personalisation Is Really About Progression
One of the core principles discussed throughout the workshop was that customers exist in different states of readiness, confidence and affinity.
Some customers are still discovering. Others are evaluating, onboarding, experimenting or becoming loyal. The role of personalisation is not simply to tailor content to those states, but to help customers successfully move through them.
That principle sits at the heart of how we think about optimisation and personalisation strategy.
Not as disconnected tactics.
Not as automated experiences for the sake of it.
But as a way of reducing friction, strengthening confidence and supporting progression.
Because ultimately, the businesses that succeed with personalisation are rarely the ones doing the most.
They are the ones creating the clearest sense of purpose behind it.
How do we prepare you to be personalisation ready?
Personalisation is one of those things that sounds straightforward until you're inside it. Most businesses don't struggle with ambition, they struggle with where to begin.
These questions come up time and again in our early conversations with clients.
Still got questions? Speak to Beth.
Our Head of Client Strategy knows here onions. Luckily, she also know an awful lot about this stuff so reach out and book a chat.
Where do we actually start with personalisation?
We have too many audiences to personalise for, so how do we prioritise?
How do we get internal alignment before we start?
Better Decisions.
We meet people where they are at, whether you are ready to start or just exploring ideas.
Wherever you are on your experimentation journey, let's chat!
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