Only 27% of Consumers Feel Brands Understand Their Interests

What happened

A new Site Impact report finds that only 27% of consumers believe brands genuinely understand their interests, despite widespread use of personalisation tools across marketing and digital experience platforms. The research, covered by CustomerThink, indicates that consumers are not opposed to personalisation itself — many say they welcome relevant, well-timed offers — but that outdated customer data and repetitive, poorly targeted messaging are undermining trust in how brands apply it.

The findings point to a gap between the intent behind personalisation strategies and their execution: brands continue to invest in targeting technology, yet the resulting experience often feels generic or stale to the people receiving it.

Why it matters

For customer experience and marketing leaders, this is a signal that personalisation maturity cannot be measured by the sophistication of the tools deployed alone — it must be judged by whether the customer feels understood. When targeting relies on outdated or fragmented data, the result is often the opposite of the intended effect: instead of building relevance and loyalty, it produces friction and scepticism.

The report also reinforces a behavioural point that experience teams frequently underestimate — repetition without refinement reads as inattentiveness, not effort. Consumers are able to distinguish between personalisation that reflects real, current understanding of them and personalisation that is simply automated repetition of past behaviour. That distinction is increasingly shaping brand trust.

By the numbers

• 27% of consumers say brands truly understand their interests, according to the Site Impact report.

The Renascence take

The headline number is less interesting than what sits behind it: this isn't a rejection of personalisation, it's a rejection of poor personalisation. That distinction matters enormously for how leaders respond.

Most organisations treat personalisation as a technology problem — better algorithms, more data points, faster targeting. The real issue is a data-freshness and governance problem: stale profiles and static segments create the repetitive, tone-deaf experiences customers are pushing back against. A genuinely customer-obsessed operator should audit how recently their "personalised" journeys have actually been updated to reflect current behaviour, not just whether personalisation exists. The brands that win here won't be the ones doing the most personalisation — they'll be the ones doing the least stale personalisation.