Hopefully put to rest by this report.
“Instead of implementing personalization strategies, the report suggests, companies should concentrate on the basics, such as making their sites easy to search and navigate.
“Given flexible, usable navigation and search, Web site visitors will be more satisfied with their experiences and will find fewer barriers to the profitable behavior sought by site operators,” according to the report published Tuesday. “In fact, good navigation can replace personalization in most cases.”
The report criticized personalization as not only ineffective, but surprisingly costly.
Personalizing a site was more than twice as likely to result in finding visitors who would never pay for anything, as it was to attract paying customers, Jupiter’s study found.
Operating the personalized Web site cost more than four times what operating a “comparable dynamic site,” Jupiter found. The report said costs came primarily from the human effort needed to measure results, manage rules and optimize the system, on top of the licensing costs for personalization software from vendors such as Broadvision, Epiphany, Teradata, IBM and ATG.
Stymieing personalization campaigns is consumers’ deep-seated suspicion of Web sites that try to extract information from them, the report found.”
An ex-colleague of mine Matt Karas has steadily held this belief (that personaisation projects never achieve a return on the investment) for the last 7/8 years I’ve known him. Although I reckon that smart reactive personalisation can make a service a lot more pleasurable and easy to use [especially for attention-impoversihed interfaces], I think pretty much the same now.
Hopefully, senior managers and the like who only can be convinced by something when they read it in a Jupiter report will now think again about the ROI of big content management and personalisation projects that don’t address tough basic service / business design questions but opt for a technological solution.
Petafloptimism 
