How do shoppers feel about personalised media?
The ability to personalise ads and other communications to individual shoppers is one of retail media’s standout benefits – but different audiences demand different approaches.
Personalisation is a net positive for shoppers. Across four key dimensions, shoppers are far more likely to be in favour of personalised experiences than against them. Nonetheless, some of the perceived benefits are viewed more favourably than others.
The strongest dimension here is 'helpfulness'. Almost half (49%) of shoppers find personalised suggestions from retailers to be highly helpful, while fewer than one in ten describe them as unhelpful. With shoppers clearly open and comfortable with this avenue, the opportunity now lies in building on that foundation.
US shoppers are generally more positive about personalised suggestions than their British peers, scoring them higher across all four measured dimensions.
Personalised media is built on relevance – and the question now isn’t whether shoppers notice personalisation, but whether the basis of that personalisation feels justified.
Platforms like Netflix and Spotify have normalised personalisation across our digital lives. While that has helped to ease any concerns about intrusiveness, it’s raised expectations too. Just as viewers and listeners want to quickly get to the content they’re interested in, shoppers expect retailers to personalise in a way that reflects their reality.
Asked which forms of personalisation feel most credible, respondents quickly aligned around communications based on their own behaviours.
trust personalised product suggestions based on prior purchases
have confidence in recommendations based on promotions or discounts
trust suggestions based on what 'people like me' tend to buy
say they trust recommendations based on general trends
The focus on prior purchases here is self-explanatory, but recommendations based on promotions and discounts are highly likely to be based on historic behaviours, too. Simply, shoppers show a clear preference for targeting that feels grounded in their own behaviours – testament to the inherent value of retailer data when building trust in personalisation at scale.
Key insight:
Personalisation is welcomed, but it’s also been normalised. To be truly effective, personalisation needs to reflect a shopper’s real-world habits and behaviours. Shoppers have come to expect personalisation as part of their shop – but general trends and broad assumptions – 'people like me', for instance – are effective to a degree, but customers reserve their trust for brands that demonstrate genuine understanding. The priority for retailers and brands now should be on what comes next: how do they tap into that widespread enthusiasm for personalisation and ensure that they’re delivering something genuinely different in that space?