Personalisation is the biggest lie brands keep telling

There’s a personalisation crisis in today’s marketing. Nearly 99% of marketers believe personalisation helps strengthen customer relationships, yet, 78% of brands lack quick access to the customer data needed to tailor their campaigns.

So, how is it that pharma brands have access to so many tools that generate tonnes of data, but when it comes to marketing personalisation still come up short?

From what I see, this is an architecture problem that no amount of shiny new tools can solve.

Marketing, sales, and customer success teams will all say they do personalisation. But do they really?

What is personalisation?

The term “personalisation” is fundamentally misunderstood. Personalisation is when something is created for one person only. Everything else is segmentation.

As a former salesperson, I can confidently say that only field force can truly personalise. When they meet a client face-to-face, they read body language, pick up on tone of voice, and modify their pitch depending on what is happening in the room.

By contrast, marketers take a subgroup of people united by common characteristics and tailor content to their assumed needs. This is segmentation, and it has limits. Always assuming that people who share a few characteristics think and behave the same way is an oversimplification bias.

Silos eat personalisation efforts for breakfast

Even when every team tailors their efforts to one particular customer, personalisation can still fail because of silos between marketing, sales, and customer success.

When a pharma brand manager mentioned during the sales call they wanted to cut costs, the rep followed their sales instincts, tailored the pitch to this need on the fly, and won the deal.

The marketing team saw the brand manager attending a webinar on team expansion a few months back, so they assumed they wanted to scale and kept sending upsell emails without a second thought. Customer success tailored their onboarding to the company size, focusing on adding more users.

The brand manager felt the vendor didn’t care enough to understand their needs and left.

All three teams seemed to be doing everything right, using the latest technology and drawing on their own experience. But silos made all marketing personalisation efforts go to the bin.

Here’s what’s happening

When sales teams record only what happened, like how many calls were made and when, they rarely question whether those conversations made the client think or behave differently. Their goal is to reach as many customers as possible, rather than give value to those who need their solution. And when the manager reviews the numbers, everything looks optimistic in the CRM only because teams measure activity instead of impact.

When marketers design journey logic after the content is ready, they trap themselves in their own segmentation decisions. Like a big cumbersome truck on a busy narrow street, they can follow the set path, but have no wiggle room when customer needs and preferences change.

CRMs and marketing automation platforms are often disconnected, so marketers are left in the dark about everything happening in the field. And marketers have no clue how their messages perform once they reach a client in a conversation.

How to get personalisation right

When I learned to drive, I remember being told to stay in the flow of traffic and match the speed of other cars. When one driver goes too fast or too slow, the traffic becomes uneven, and the flow loses its rhythm. The same applies toteams’ work and their speed.

Instead of each team moving with their own activity-based KPIs, they need to clearly see the destination or, in other words, understand common goals. What actions do they want their customer to take after engaging with them?

The next step is to make sure all tools are interconnected. While most content authoring vendors offer integration with CRMs and marketing automation, few allow it to be maintained over time without constant manual fixes. Durable integration changes that. This is why Viseven focuses on building integrations that hold up through an external platform's updates.

But ensuring integration depth is not enough. To scale personalisation, teams also need to navigate the data flowing in from all connected solutions. Otherwise, teams would struggle to find modules tailored to a specific customer, which makes them fall back on reusing familiar content, rather than what's most relevant. In this case, we recommend our clients to use an AI agent, like our eVa, connected to their digital asset management (DAM) system to get intelligent recommendations based on the specific client in front of them.

Quick self-check

The most interesting take I’ve heard recently – brands aren’t failing at personalisation because attention spans are shrinking. With tonnes of messages and information bombarding audiences 24/7, they just need to offer more value than ever before to stop the customers’ scroll.

If we take the Pareto principle, 80% of outcomes come from 20% of efforts. Which 20% of customers drive the most value needs to be identified. Then ask the question, have their behaviours shifted the way expected over the last year? Be specific and rely on data.

If there is hesitation when answering these questions, or the honest answer is no, it may be time to revisit the current personalisation strategy. At Viseven, we help pharma brands move beyond surface-level personalisation and focus on measurable impact.

About the author

Nataliya Andreychuk is the CEO and co-founder of Viseven, a global MarTech services provider for life sciences and pharma industries. She is one of the top experts in digital pharma marketing and digital content implementation and has more than 14 years of solid leadership behind her belt. Andreychuk is among the strongest female leaders in the marketing technology world. She has been contributing her vast expertise to developing smart digital solutions and software, which are now serving clients in over 70 global markets, delivering intelligent, personalised content across channels, platforms, and countries.

About Viseven

Viseven is a global MarTech company specializing in digital content solutions for the Life Sciences and Pharma industries. With over 15 years of expertise, Viseven empowers pharmaceutical companies and their production agencies with AI-driven content management and automation solutions.

Our flagship eWizard Platform streamlines content planning, creation, distribution, and management—enhancing efficiency, reducing operational costs, and accelerating brand time-to-market. Designed for omnichannel and multichannel engagement, eWizard optimizes campaign management, data collection, and performance analysis, ensuring continuous message improvement for Brand Managers and Content Operations teams.

Visit us at viseven.com or follow us on social media: LinkedIn