80 per cent of marketers will abandon their personalisation efforts by 2025: report

By 2025, 80 per cent of marketers who have invested in personalization will abandon their efforts due to lack of ROI, the perils of customer data management or both, according to new research from Gartner. In fact, 27 per cent of marketers believe data is the key obstacle to personalization, revealing their weaknesses in data collection, integration and protection.

The figures come from a new Gartner report, and are based on interviews with 142 marketing executives who attended the Gartner Symposium in San Diego. The report also contains predictions from Gartner analysts, based on reports the analyst has produced this year.

The report found that marketers face other impediments to personalization success, including the continuing decline in consumer trust, increased scrutiny by regulators and tracking barriers erected by tech companies. While personalization comprises 14 per cent of the marketing budget, more than one in four marketing leaders cite technology as a major hurdle to personalization.

“Consumers have developed an increasingly jaundiced eye toward marketers’ efforts to embrace them,” said Charles Golvin, senior director analyst in the Gartner for Marketers practice. “Their increasingly cluttered email inboxes and mobile phone notification centers may lead them to ignore even the most carefully personalized and contextualized message. Marketers must really adopt the basics when it comes to test and learn before investing in personalization technology and new tactics.”

The report also highlights a declining level of trust in influencer marketing. In fact, Gartner predicts that, by 2023, chief marketing officer (CMO) budget allocation on influencer marketing will decrease by a third as consumers continue to lose trust in brands and entities they don’t personally know.

The analyst also predicts that, by 2021, consumers will have launched class action lawsuits against high-profile influencers, and that by 2022, CMOs will diversify their influencer strategies away from influencers with more than one million followers to smaller-scale influencers.

Finally, in an era where data privacy is becoming more important by the day, Gartner predicts that, in 2023, one-third of all brand public relations disasters will result from data ethics failures.