Only 27% of Consumers Say Brands Actually Understand Their Interests, New Site Impact Report Finds

What happened

A new report from Site Impact finds that only 27% of consumers believe brands genuinely understand their interests, pointing to a persistent gap between how much personalisation companies attempt and how well it actually lands. The report attributes much of this disconnect to outdated customer data and repetitive targeting, which leave audiences feeling misread rather than recognised.

Rather than reflecting a lack of investment in personalisation, the findings suggest a data and execution problem: brands are collecting and acting on signals that no longer reflect who the customer is or what they currently want, resulting in messaging that feels generic or stale even when it is technically "targeted."

Why it matters

For experience and marketing leaders, this is a reminder that personalisation is only as good as the data pipeline and refresh cadence behind it. Consumers are increasingly able to tell the difference between adaptive, contextually relevant communication and recycled segmentation — and when brands get it wrong repeatedly, it erodes trust in the broader value exchange of sharing personal data at all.

The finding also has implications for how organisations sequence their technology investments. Many companies have prioritised the front-end delivery of personalised experiences — recommendation engines, dynamic content, targeted offers — without matching investment in the underlying data hygiene, consent management and preference-refresh mechanics needed to keep those experiences credible over time.

The Renascence take

The 27% figure is less an indictment of personalisation as a strategy than of how narrowly most organisations define it — as a targeting exercise rather than a listening one.

Most brands treat personalisation as a data problem to be solved once, when it is actually a relationship to be maintained continuously. The behavioral reality is that repetitive or outdated targeting doesn't just fail to add value — it actively signals to customers that the brand isn't paying attention, which is more damaging to trust than generic messaging would have been. Customer-obsessed operators should treat personalisation systems the way they treat any perishable asset: with expiry dates, feedback loops and regular re-validation against what customers are actually doing now, not what they did months ago.