Followers don’t equal fans: Rethinking brand personalisation

We generally believe that if a brand page has thousands of followers on Meta, we are building a loyal community. That is not the case anymore.

Algorithms now decide who sees what, and organic reach is very limited unless backed by paid budgets. We also thought that once we have a community, we’ll be able to personalise the content for them but even that is not taking us anywhere because, the personalisation of feed on these platforms is not really ours—it belongs to the platforms, not the brands.

So, the question is: if all personalisation is happening inside the platforms, are brands truly benefiting from it, or just renting attention for a while?

Hence the focus should be on treating brand pages more like a ‘social flagship stores’—a place people occasionally visit to check the brand story and not an engine of scale. If the platforms are already deciding what your audience sees, then the number of followers has little strategic value.

Maybe we need to rethink where we can do meaningful personalisation of content.

Community to commodity: The reach dilemma

So, where does real personalisation can happen? The first one is a brand’s owned spaces like websites, landing pages, apps, loyalty programs, CRM-driven journeys, user data, personalised emails, WhatsApp.

This is where data can be turned into contextual, brand-owned conversations. You can segment the data, put an idea to it and AI can scale it fast.

The next one is shared spaces like social platforms, which remain useful for amplification. But are interest buckets on Meta or YouTube really ‘personalisation’, or just categorisation? That’s the challenge—these spaces personalise for engagement, not for brand growth.

And then there are emerging spaces. AI-powered chatbots, generative brand assistants, and agent-driven experiences are on the horizon. Here, personalisation could go beyond content—into experiences, advice, even co-creation.

Personalisation as a differentiator

By definition, personalisation means finer segmentation. Barring few brands like Netflix, Spotify, Amazon or Starbucks, most brands have used personalisation of messages as campaign ideas. The above brands have used personalisation by linking solid data and emotion with the layer of predictive analysis.

That’s why different segments see different stimuluses. AI has made it possible to do it at scale and quickly.

The start point hence has to be what is the strategic intent? Reduce churn, deepen loyalty, get more GenZs, or simply make people feel emotionally connected.

And this needs data collected over time by the clients. Transactional data, demographics, cart, social, WhatsApp, promotional, and emails. Many big brands do analyze this data but they use the findings for writing agency briefs.

Most times, we are not shared the life stages of consumers’ journeys from this analysis and we end up doing random content tailoring instead of strategy. It’s not just about addressing people by their names.

Agencies as partners, not just distributors

Every time technology like AI disrupts, someone declares ‘this is the end of agencies’ The truth? They will become more experimentative.

Agencies today have to be not just distributors of content but partners in creating personalised content. They bring what AI can’t: the ability to connect raw data with human stories.

Data without story telling is boring. Storytelling without data is generic. Put together, they create personal impact at scale.

All the agencies won’t own every capability under one roof. Like data tech stack and analysis, app building, AI creatives, AI distribution, performance and storytelling.

Instead, they’ll form strategic partnerships with many service providers. We are also moving in the same direction. But our core value of content creation will remain the same: crafting ideas and narratives that keep expanding the top funnel. Because you can’t personalise to a shrinking audience.

- Sanjay Deshmukh, CEO, Garage Worldwide.