Hello $Firstname AI Edition, Chapter 15: The Basic Foundations for Personalisation

In Chapter 15 of Hello $Firstname, Ida Söderbäck reads ‘The Basic Foundations for Personalisation’.

Ida Söderbäck is a customer loyalty and CRM marketing expert currently at the Swedish Red Cross. In this chapter, she reads the opening chapter of Part Three, where the book turns from what personalisation is and how it creates value to when personalisation is actually the right tactic to use.

The chapter asks three important questions: Do you have the prerequisites to do personalisation? Is it the right thing for your organisation to do? And is it the right thing to do now?

It argues that personalisation is a distinct communication tactic, not the answer to every marketing or business challenge. Before investing heavily in personalisation, organisations need a solid core offering, brand trust and demand, access to customer data and insights, and enough content to match those insights with something useful to say.

The chapter also makes a pragmatic point that is sometimes overlooked in personalisation projects: if the value proposition is weak, if the customer experience is fundamentally broken, or if no one knows or trusts your brand yet, personalisation is unlikely to fix the problem.

In her reflection at the end, Ida connects the chapter to loyalty and CRM. For her, personalisation is central to creating relevant communication, building relationships, and increasing loyalty and revenue. But she also underlines the chapter’s core message: personalisation becomes powerful only when the organisation has the right prerequisites, including individual-level data, the right competencies, and the martech systems to put it all into action.

The chapter serves as a useful reality check for any marketing leader facing pressure to personalise before the basics are in place.

More resources from the Hello $Firstname universe

You can buy the physical book here:
https://amzn.eu/d/6jV4QZT

If the Amazon EU link does not work in your country, please search for Hello $Firstname: Profiting from Personalisation, AI Edition on your local Amazon store.

You can download the illustrations and models from the book here:
https://www.omnichannelinstitute.com/en/resources

You can also learn more about the Personalisation Cards and Canvas, which help teams turn the Bowtie of Personalisation into practical use cases, here:
https://www.omnichannelinstitute.com/en/personalizationcards