In this exclusive op-ed, Sam Hoare, area vice president ANZ at DXP content platform, Contentful, argues that while brands continue to pour investment into digital, many are still treating customers like strangers. He warns that without a serious shift towards personalisation, brands risk spiralling costs and missing the opportunity to create meaningful customer experiences.
There’s a particular kind of insulting experience that every Australian online shopper knows well.
You’ve visited a retailer’s website three times this week. You’ve lingered in the same category, added things to your cart, abandoned it, and come back.
And when you return, the homepage greets you with the same generic banner it shows literally everyone: a mass-market promotion for products you’ve never once looked at, delivered with all the personal warmth of a government notice.
This is personalisation theatre. And it’s costing brands more than they realise.
According to research, over 70 per cent of customers now expect brands to deliver personalised content experiences when they engage online. More pointedly, more than 75 per cent report frustration when that doesn’t happen. That’s not a marginal group of fussy shoppers. That’s your customer base, quietly deciding whether your competitor deserves their business instead.
The problem isn’t that Australian brands don’t care about personalisation. Most of them do. The problem is that many are still doing it in a way that was already outdated five years ago.
The difference between personalisation and actual personalisation
Here’s the distinction that matters. Static personalisation takes what it already knows about you (your name, your purchase history, your general location) and uses that to serve a fixed, pre-determined experience. You get a ‘Welcome back’ message. Maybe a curated product list based on something you bought six months ago. It’s better than nothing, but it’s essentially a mail merge with a better UX.
Dynamic personalisation is something else entirely. It responds to what you’re doing right now, not who you were last quarter. The pages you’re clicking through, the product category you’ve been circling for the past ten minutes, how long you watched that video, and whether you’ve got items sitting in your cart. It reads intent in real time and reshapes the experience around it.
Think about the difference in context. A customer landing on your site after clicking an Instagram ad for winter outerwear shouldn’t see the same homepage as a returning buyer browsing your summer clearance. They’re in completely different mindsets, with completely different needs. Serving them identical content isn’t neutral. It’s a missed opportunity with a price tag attached.
The best moment to deliver a relevant experience to a customer isn’t after they’ve left your site. It’s while they’re on it, at the exact moment they’re trying to make a decision.
Scale isn’t the barrier anymore
There’s a persistent myth that this kind of sophisticated personalisation is reserved for the Amazons of the world, brands with armies of engineers and data science teams to make it work. That’s no longer true, and brands that keep believing it are falling behind.
Consider Ruggable, an e-commerce brand selling washable rugs worldwide, including in Australia. Using an AI-native personalisation platform, the company personalises its homepage with different experiences for dog and cat owners. Simple idea, big difference. A customer who clicks through from a dog-focused campaign lands on a different experience than someone who browses cat-related content.
But the real value comes when brands like Ruggable move beyond broad segments into hyper-personalisation. Instead of stopping at ‘dog owner’ or ‘cat owner’, brands can personalise experiences around specific campaigns, particular breeds, or even location. A city-based cat owner might see different products, imagery and messaging from someone living rurally with two working dogs and a muddy back garden.
That level of granularity used to be painfully difficult. Now it comes down to smarter segmentation rules and a modular content architecture that let marketers adapt experiences without waiting for developers whenever they want to change a banner, launch a campaign, or test a new audience segment.
This is what modern content infrastructure actually enables: non-technical teams, writers, marketers, and editors owning and optimising the experience without being bottlenecked by engineering. Faster time to market. Less operational drag. More capacity to focus on the creative and strategic work that actually moves the needle.
The real cost of standing still
Here’s the uncomfortable reality for brands still running on legacy CMS infrastructure or bolt-on personalisation tools: the gap between what customers expect and what most digital experiences actually deliver is widening. And in a market where retention is harder and acquisition costs keep climbing, relevance isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s a commercial imperative.
Dynamic personalisation isn’t about surveillance or gimmickry. It’s about respecting your customer’s time. If someone has shown you exactly what they’re interested in through their behaviour on your site, serving them something irrelevant isn’t just ineffective. It’s actively bad service.
The brands that will win the next five years of digital commerce aren’t the ones that produce the most content. They’re the ones whose content knows when to show up, what to say, and how to adapt when the customer changes their mind. Everything else is just noise dressed up as marketing.
