Building bridges for personalization: A process model for marketing

It has been suggested that personalization offers an avenue to improve marketing performance; however, there are several organizational and technical hurdles that hinder the efforts of marketers in capitalizing on it. This is largely because personalization has been executed as several disconnected campaigns and operations in many companies. Marketers also may have faced challenges posed by systems integration and organizational processes. In this article, we show how seeing personalization as a process helps marketers manage and execute it more effectively. A process view shows how the different phases of personalization—customer interactions, analyses of customer data, customization based on customer profiles, and targeting of marketing activities—are linked. Process analysis further identifies the key stumbling blocks that arise from ineffective integration of these phases.