In Chapter 16 of Hello $Firstname, Keanu Taylor reads ‘The CX Layers: How Data and Content Fuel Personalisation’.
Keanu Taylor is Global Head of Research at The MarTech Weekly, a global analyst firm helping enterprise brands turn the complexity of marketing technology into clarity. In this chapter, he reads about the CX Layers framework and how data and content work in parallel to fuel personalisation.
The chapter explains why many personalisation projects have historically been too data-centric. Data is essential, but data alone does not create a personalised customer experience. It needs to be matched with content that is structured, governed, scalable, and ready to be activated.
The CX Layers framework separates the work into three layers: the data layer, the content layer, and the personalisation layer. The data layer collects, cleans, models, and activates customer insight. The content layer collects, creates, models, and activates the content required for personalised experiences. The personalisation layer is where these two sides come together through experience optimisation, experience decisioning, and experience delivery.
The chapter also explores how generative AI changes both sides of the equation. AI can help scale qualitative insight from conversations, reviews, support dialogues, and other unstructured sources. It can also help marketers create, model, repurpose, translate, tag, and activate content in ways that make personalisation more operationally realistic.
In his reflection at the end, Keanu connects the CX Layers model to the emerging discipline of context engineering. His point is that enterprises do not only need content. They also need to manage the context around that content: when it is relevant, which use cases it belongs to, when it should no longer be used, and how it should be made available to AI and personalisation systems.
The chapter gives marketers and martech teams a clearer way to think about the prerequisites for personalisation: not as a single data project, not as a content production problem, but as a layered system where data, content, and decisioning have to work together.
More resources from the Hello $Firstname universe
You can buy the physical book here:
https://amzn.eu/d/6jV4QZT
If the Amazon EU link does not work in your country, please search for Hello $Firstname: Profiting from Personalisation, AI Edition on your local Amazon store.
You can download the illustrations and models from the book here:
https://www.omnichannelinstitute.com/en/resources
You can also learn more about the Personalisation Cards and Canvas, which help teams turn the Bowtie of Personalisation into practical use cases, here:
https://www.omnichannelinstitute.com/en/personalizationcards
