The Personalization Myth: How We’ve Failed and What We Can Do
by Stef Hoffman, Group Strategy Director at Code and Theory
March 12, 2025
For over two decades, we’ve chased the holy grail of personalization — an experience that forges true intimacy between brands and customers, building trust, loyalty and lifetime value.
Yet our ever-growing fixation on instant gratification and immediacy has led us to define “personalization” simply as smarter targeting. Not only is it exhausting for marketers to tailor every detail to individual customers, this “false finish line,” as Gartner calls it, has left us living in a world of isolated clicks and transactions instead of one encompassing trust and value.
We have been chasing the wrong goal.
Personalization was never meant to be a one-way street — a tool to squeeze more revenue and chase goals that satisfy the business. Our ambitions have always been to create two-way value exchanges that enrich the customer experience. And yet we’ve moved further away from chasing goals that satisfy the customer.
With artificial intelligence, this problem has the potential to get exponentially worse.
We’re about to see an explosion of content. With AI powering the systems that enable personalization (data layers, personalization engines, the content supply chain, etc.), these dynamic, smart systems are making it easier than ever for brands to produce content for individuals at scale.
But will it be content that serves the customer, helps build trust and creates customer experiences that feel like continuous, meaningful conversations? Or will it be content that makes customers feel like a means to an end, where each interaction feels disconnected from the last? Or worse, forgettable?
Marketers’ ability to realize the real promise of personalization has as much to do with the AI-powered technology and data available to them as it does with how they train it.
We finally have the technology that can deliver personalization at scale, but if it isn’t trained properly, it will create customer experiences that feel disconnected, inconsistent, forgettable and confusing.
The consequences are serious — brand dilution, weaker differentiation, higher marketing costs and lost revenue. Perhaps the most dire ramification of all is the loss of interest and trust, as customers bail on the brand.
The problem: This process is entirely dependent on the people using this advanced technology and their ability (or lack thereof) to train it with the right assets and design systems.
We are allowing too much room for human error and interpretation.
Best-case scenario, marketers use assets from their digital asset management system (DAM) to influence and train the tools they use to deliver content at scale. But how well did those assets convey the brand’s foundational promise? How well did those assets adhere to the brand guidelines? Were the assets set up to be modular? How well did those assets even perform? These questions, among hundreds of others, are often overlooked because it’s easier to assume every asset and guideline has been designed, governed and optimized properly.
A Unified Brand System Is the Framework for Personalization at Scale
Every brand needs a Unified Brand System. It’s what mitigates human error and interpretation in pursuit of personalization at scale.
What is a Unified Brand System?
It is the collection of elements and components that allows for the creation of consistent, relevant, meaningful content, including everything from the foundational audience strategy and brand strategy to the brand expression (visually and verbally) to the scalable design systems to the contextual systems that allow for truly context-aware, personalized experiences.
At Code and Theory, we’ve developed an approach for assessing the Unified Brand System’s components for readiness and applicability in this AI-driven era and optimizing them. Our approach uses AI and human intelligence, honed over nearly a quarter-century of working with clients at the intersection of creativity and technology.
This model is an organic expression of Code and Theory’s market differentiator as the rare company offering a hybrid expertise that blends creativity and technology equally. Code and Theory dissolves the boundaries between design and systems, melding disciplines and approaches that are typically disconnected to create truly unified, relevant customer experiences.
Changing How We Think and Work
If we want to break free from the false promise of personalization, we have to change how we build it.
AI may finally give us the scale we’ve long pursued, but without a unified system to guide it, scale is meaningless. More content, more targeting, more dynamic optimization — none of it will create trust or long-term value if the foundation is flawed.
A Unified Brand System isn’t just a safeguard against inconsistency, fragmentation and human error — it’s the framework that allows brands to deliver personalization how it was meant to be: not just for the brand but for the customer. It’s a system that ensures every output — every message, every interaction, every touchpoint — feels like it belongs to the same cohesive experience, no matter how much AI accelerates the process.
At Code and Theory, we don’t retrofit brands for an AI-powered future — we engineer the systems that make AI work for brands, not against them. The brands that get this right will move beyond personalization as a transactional tool and finally build the meaningful, trust-driven relationships customers have been waiting for. The brands that don’t will flood the world with more noise — disconnected, forgettable and easy to ignore.
The question isn’t whether AI will power personalization. It will. The real question is: Will your brand’s foundation be strong enough to make it meaningful.
Stef Hoffman is the Group Creative Director of Brand at Code and Theory. Get in touch!
About the Code and Theory Network
The Code and Theory Network is the only technology and creative network with a balance of 50% creative and 50% engineers. Our unique makeup makes us the place where CMOs, CTOs and CIOs come together to drive results for their businesses. We partner with our clients to redefine what is possible to create lasting impact and drive long-term growth. Part of Stagwell, Code and Theory offers a global footprint and the capabilities to work across the entirety of the customer-facing journey, and implement the technology that powers it. The network includes the flagship agency Code and Theory as well as Kettle, Instrument, Left Field Labs, Truelogic, Create. Group, Rhythm and Mediacurrent. Code and Theory clients include Amazon, JPMorganChase, Microsoft, NBC, NFL and Yeti. For more, visit codeandtheory.com