In Chapter 18 of Hello $Firstname, Fiona Ngaruro reads ‘Models of Organisational Maturity in Personalisation’.
Fiona Ngaruro is a digital growth and marketing technology strategist based in Nairobi, Kenya, and the creator and host of the Martech Unraveled podcast, which explores how marketing and technology are shaping business growth across Africa. In this chapter, she opens Part Four of the book, where the focus moves from what to build to how an organisation matures so it can keep building personalisation profitably.
The chapter introduces the back end of the Pyramid of Personalisation. Where the front end describes the scope of personalised experiences customers receive, the back end describes the organisational capabilities that make those experiences possible: people and skills, technology, and governance, each across three maturity levels.
To build the model, the chapter draws on three sources of inspiration. The first is the Omnichannel Hexagon from Make It All About Me, which showed that organisations do not abandon earlier practices as they mature. The second is a 2022 Forrester Consulting study on omnichannel marketing automation, which found that people challenges can be just as hard to solve as technology challenges. The third, and most important, is Frans Riemersma’s model of marketing productisation from MartechTribe.
That model gives the back end its three levels: Hack, Pack, and Stack. At the Hack level, you rapidly prototype combinations of insights, content, and features with real customers to see what is viable. At the Pack level, you strip away everything redundant and keep a lean version of what works. At the Stack level, that version is integrated into your platform ecosystem with the goal of zero maintenance. Between each level sits a glass ceiling you will need to break through.
The central idea is that personalisation should eventually be treated almost as a product in its own right, complete with product owners, standards, and automation. Defining a standard means ruling out the exceptions, and whatever is standardised can be automated.
In her reflection at the end, Fiona highlights exactly this shift from campaigns and projects to productised capability. Teams often celebrate a successful campaign without asking how to turn it into something repeatable. Productisation frees teams from the day-to-day slog of execution so they can spend more time on strategic and creative work.
The chapter sets the stage for the rest of Part Four, which explores each dimension of the back end in turn.
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
