Klaviyo surveyed 1,002 Singapore shoppers this year, and what we found should interest every marketer running a personalisation program:
- 76% of Singapore shoppers have used AI to find or decide on a product in the last 3 months.
- 58% will hand over more personal data if it gets them something relevant back.
- Nearly half say all they really want is to stop getting messages that have nothing to do with them, and want to be treated like a returning customer instead of a transaction.
Put those facts side by side and you end up with a real contradiction. Brands have more customer data, more AI, and more channels to reach people than at any point before. But customers feel less known than ever.
That's the personalisation paradox, and it's what Elaine Seeto, Klaviyo’s head of marketing, APAC, sat down to discuss at the opening of Klaviyo's new Asia headquarters in Singapore, with 3 people who deal with this tension for a living:
- Leah Howatson, VP of marketing at furniture brand Castlery
- Benjamin Huang, co-founder of partner-led ecommerce business Omnidesk
- Christian Nejm, head of advisory & GTM at global consultancy Accenture Song
Here's what came out of the session.
Data is the easy part
Ask 3 people from 3 different businesses what personalisation actually requires, and you might expect 3 different answers. Instead, all 3 panelists arrived at the same conclusion.
"I agree that data is just the starting point," Howatson said. "Data is almost the easy part. But where you go from there needs a lot of focus from the business."
Huang put it more bluntly: "For me, personalisation is not really a data problem."
Seeto named the pattern after hearing all 3 guests make the point from different angles: "We can automate the delivery of an experience. But we can't automate our way out of understanding who our customer is, what they need, and why they're engaging with us."
That's the paradox in one sentence: you can automate the sending, but you can't automate the understanding that makes the sending worth receiving.
AI is a tool, not a strategy
Nejm's read on where AI fits into the personalisation landscape was the most direct pushback against treating it as a shortcut: "AI is a new technology. Just like previous iterations of technology, digital, channel, whatever it was, it’s a tool that enables.”
“So the idea of saying, ‘We're going to use AI in everything, in every domain, in every use case’ is not what to do,” Nejm cautioned. “Really understand the strategy and where you want to differentiate."
Nejm also argued that most brands still concentrate their personalisation effort at the top of the funnel, when the real opportunity now spans the entire customer lifecycle.
"The personalisation of the past was very much data-led content, driven to engagement and wins,” Nejm pointed out. “What we're seeing now is personalisation turning up across the entire customer lifetime. It's not just awareness and engagement. It's in the conversion, it's in the loyalty. How does it turn up in the service journey?"
Pick a North Star, then actually follow it
Howatson's contribution was the most immediately actionable: a simple discipline for teams overwhelmed by competing priorities.
"You need a clear North Star, and that North Star can change,” Howatson explained. “You have a long list of things to do: do you want to increase subscribers, acquisition of first orders, average order value, repeat purchases? Every 6 months you pick one of those and just dive into it. That work plan is aligned, and everyone's aligned towards that North Star for that period of time."
Howatson builds that North Star from 3 inputs:
- Customer insight tells you what people want.
- Competitor tracking tells you where the market's moving.
- Climate, or how the economy's doing, tells you how much of that spending appetite actually holds up—particularly important for a big-ticket category like furniture.
Show up where the shopping is happening
Huang got the biggest reaction in the room when he commented on where customer discovery is moving.
"AI is becoming a new friend,” Huang said. “Right now we're very much focused on: when a customer comes to a website, how do we retain them, how do we convert them? But now, customers are asking AI, for example, ‘What's the best desk out there?’ Your brand is either there, or it's not."
In other words, personalisation isn't just about what you do once someone's already on your site. It's about whether you show up at all, in a conversation you're not part of yet.
The gap the personalisation paradox describes
Put 3 perspectives from a furniture brand, a partner-led ecommerce business, and a global consultancy together, and you arrive at an interesting conclusion.
Nejm's read is that AI only earns its keep once it's pointed at a clear strategy. Howatson's is that a business needs one priority at a time, not 5 running at once. Huang's is that the personalisation moment now starts before a customer even reaches your site.
Our takeaway: the technology can carry the message. Deciding who that message is for, and why, is still on you.
That's also the thinking behind Klaviyo's new office in Singapore. Brands in this region don't need someone else telling them Singapore shoppers are ahead of the curve on AI. They need a team close and invested enough to help them act on that knowledge in real time.