Definition
A good definition of personalization is the following:
Personalization technology enables the dynamic insertion, customization or suggestion of content in any format that is relevant to the individual user, based on the user’s implicit behaviour and preferences, and explicitly given details.
This can be dissected as:
"Personalization technology enables the dynamic insertion, customization or suggestion of content" – personalization doesn’t just have to be product recommendations: it can also include inserting any content like images or text (e.g. displaying a golf-orientated banner for a returning golf supplies buyer), or customizing content that is already there (e.g. “Hi Joe, we’ve got some great movie suggestions for you!”).
“…in any format” – it isn’t restricted to the web. It can be implemented for any medium or touchpoint, such as emails, apps, instore kiosks, etc.
“…that is relevant to the individual user, based on the user’s implicit behaviour and preferences, and explicitly given details” – finally, the most important part. Personalization uses both implicit and explicit information, derived in two ways. Firstly, a visitor might explicitly declare some information, such as their gender or date of birth.
Read more about this topic: Personalization
Famous quotes containing the word definition:
“Although there is no universal agreement as to a definition of life, its biological manifestations are generally considered to be organization, metabolism, growth, irritability, adaptation, and reproduction.”
—The Columbia Encyclopedia, Fifth Edition, the first sentence of the article on “life” (based on wording in the First Edition, 1935)
“The definition of good prose is proper words in their proper places; of good verse, the most proper words in their proper places. The propriety is in either case relative. The words in prose ought to express the intended meaning, and no more; if they attract attention to themselves, it is, in general, a fault.”
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)
“Beauty, like all other qualities presented to human experience, is relative; and the definition of it becomes unmeaning and useless in proportion to its abstractness. To define beauty not in the most abstract, but in the most concrete terms possible, not to find a universal formula for it, but the formula which expresses most adequately this or that special manifestation of it, is the aim of the true student of aesthetics.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)