By Retail Brew Staff
less than 3 min read
Definition:
Personalization is an increasingly popular strategy retailers employ to more closely meet the needs of individual consumers. This often comes in the form of utilizing past purchase and browsing data to give shoppers more personally tailored suggestions—helping them quickly and easily identify products they’re most likely to buy, or reminding them of some of the strange things they found themselves online shopping for in the middle of the night.
Personalization background: Personalization has become particularly essential for retailers and brands in the age of e-commerce, which has provided a myriad of ways to utilize first-party data to tailor messaging presented to different consumers, whether product recommendations based on their past purchases and shopping history, reminders to restock on items they previously bought, or discounts targeted to their shopping preferences.
It’s a worthwhile strategy: According to Boston Consulting Group, retailers that offer personalized offers see three times higher ROI than those offering mass promotions.
Consumers, particularly younger ones who are digital natives, raised in an online world built around customization, have also come to expect personalization as part of their shopping journeys. Gen Alpha consumers even like to co-create with retail brands. Of course, there’s personal and then there’s too personal—a celeb beauty brand once required consumers to send a swab of their DNA to give them individual skin care products and it didn’t quite pan out, shockingly.
Personalization in context: “Some brands are already leaning into this penchant for personalization. Gonzalez cited beauty brands like Bubble, which has a brand ambassador program that allows customers 16+ to participate in product testing, and sneaker brand Converse, which allows shoppers to customize sneakers and made research firm Beano Brain’s list of Coolest Brands 2025, according to Gen Alpha.”
