Personalisation Trust Gap: Only 27% Feel Brands Understand Them

What happened

A new report from Site Impact finds that only 27% of consumers believe brands genuinely understand their interests, pointing to a widening gap between the personalisation efforts companies invest in and what customers actually experience. The research links this trust deficit to two recurring failures: marketing systems that rely on stale or outdated customer data, and targeting that repeats the same messages or offers regardless of whether a customer has already engaged with them.

Rather than a single high-profile launch or policy shift, the report captures a broader pattern across the marketing and CX industry — personalisation technology has scaled faster than the data discipline needed to make it credible. The result, according to the findings, is that many consumers experience "personalised" marketing as generic, repetitive or out of step with their actual behaviour.

Why it matters

For experience and marketing leaders, the finding cuts against years of investment in personalisation engines, CDPs and AI-driven targeting. If fewer than three in ten consumers feel understood despite this investment, the issue is unlikely to be a lack of technology — it is more likely a data quality, governance and orchestration problem. Stale profiles and repetitive targeting suggest that many organisations are still optimising for reach and frequency rather than for relevance and recency.

This has direct implications for trust. Personalisation that misfires does not read as neutral to customers; it reads as evidence that a brand either doesn't know them or hasn't bothered to check. That perception compounds over repeated interactions, making it harder to earn attention or credibility later, even when a brand's underlying offer is genuinely relevant.

By the numbers

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

The Renascence take

The instinct in most organisations is to treat low personalisation scores as a technology gap — more data sources, more AI, more automation. The Site Impact findings suggest the real issue sits earlier in the pipeline: data hygiene, update cadence, and the judgement calls about when to stop repeating a message a customer has already seen or acted on.

Personalisation fails not because brands lack data, but because they rarely audit whether that data is still true. A customer's profile from six months ago is not a neutral starting point — it is an active liability if it drives today's targeting. The fix isn't a bigger model; it's a discipline of expiring stale signals, capping repetition, and treating "we don't know enough yet" as an acceptable default over a confidently wrong guess. Brands that build in that humility will out-trust competitors who simply personalise harder.