The data: Marketers say that customer expectations are rising and acquisition is getting harder, but personalization—a key tactic for increasing customer satisfaction—is lagging.

Eighty-five percent of global marketing professionals say customer expectations are rising—about things like user experience and customization—and more than two-thirds (69%) say it’s harder than ever to acquire new customers, per Salesforce’s 2026 State of Marketing report.

Amid those rising challenges, more than half (51%) admit their campaigns can come across as generic at times, while 37% say messaging lacks consistency across channels.

• 78% say they need more personalized content than they can produce.
• Two-thirds say it’s hard to balance personalization efforts with laws and regulations, and 63% say it’s hard to keep up with production needs.

What it means: The disconnect highlights the tension between demanding consumers and marketers’ ability to deliver on user expectations.

As acquisition costs climb and loyalty becomes harder to secure, brands can’t afford to depend on one-size-fits-all messaging. Yet operational constraints—from production bottlenecks to compliance concerns—are limiting how effectively teams can scale customization.

AI potential: One route to personalization is using AI, including applications like predictive audience segmentation. However, data quality issues are preventing AI initiatives from being fully realized—98% of marketers using AI report at least one hurdle to personalization.

The top blockers of AI-driven personalization are data being siloed across channels, having too much data to process, and poor data quality.

This means that simply investing in AI tools won’t solve the personalization gap. To unlock meaningful gains, marketers need to prioritize data unification and governance to drive consistent, scalable personalization.

Recommendations for marketers: Prioritize data quality and unification, and streamline content production.

• Integrate zero-, first-, and third-party data across channels to create a single customer identity.
• Clean and standardize high-value data inputs to improve campaign consistency.
• Simplify ideation-to-production pipelines to ensure that content can be efficiently created, approved, and posted to keep up with trends and customer desires.

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