What: Advanced personalisation techniques are setting a high bar for fashion brands, 71% of consumers expect personalised interactions with companies.

Why is it important: Declining brand loyalty among customers and increased competition for attention from social media platforms, along with tightening regulations and moves by Apple and Google to modify access to third-party data, are all impacting the ability of brands to connect with customers online. Now more than ever, personalisation can hold the key for brands to capture market share.

Offering hyper personalisation will require companies to reimagine how e-commerce operates. Search-based shopping is likely to shift to the individualised discovery of products and styles offered in the right size and fit. All customers will have a curated experience on their own versions of brand websites and marketplaces, from landing page to payment, akin to their experience on social media feeds. With this, companies will use personalisation technology to build experiences that drive customer engagement and, ultimately, loyalty.

Looking ahead in the luxury segment, hyper personalisation is set to also play out in physical stores. Store associates can leverage first-party data to provide customers with a unique experience no matter which store they enter, taking in-store clienteling to the next level.

Accelerating first-party data collection

Challenge: Changes to data privacy laws and restrictions on third-party data collection in various jurisdictions have rendered data management platforms and third-party cookies less relevant.

Solution: Brands need to maximise their first-party data collection to enable personalisation across platforms and channels.

Creating a 360-degree customer view

Challenge: When shopping for fashion, customers can generate a vast amount of data across channels and platforms, ranging from location data to website or app engagement time.

Solution: Brands need to establish a complete customer profile connected to a unique ID across data sources and channels. A customer data platform is needed to host all data assets and consolidate the customer view, as are rigorous data standardisation and cleaning processes.

Aligning the ‘human touch’ and AI

Challenge: Fashion customer behaviour can be difficult to predict, not least because of fashion’s rapid trend cycles and the low levels of repeat purchasing among individual shoppers.

Solution: Players need to develop advanced AI models, such as those that display products and photo styles best suited to the individual customer, or models that use advanced size and fit algorithms.

Scaling personalisation solutions

Challenge: A significant platform upgrade is required to deliver sophisticated, hyper-personalised e-commerce content, which is informed by thousands of data points and delivered across multiple channels with ultra-fast loading times.

Solution: A company’s portfolio of design and distribution tools needs to include content management systems that can standardise, centralise and distribute digital elements to support marketing alongside content delivery networks that help deliver thousands of unique landing and content pages.

Customer conversion costs are rising amid new privacy restrictions and limits on third-party data collection. Players can drive customer lifetime value by pushing beyond basic segmentation and ad hoc targeting to hyper-personalised shopping experiences across all touchpoints.

The opportunity in hyper-personalising shopping