Are CMOs Missing the Customer?, ETBrandEquity
Wasn’t marketing behaving like a teenager let loose in a data warehouse for the last decade? More data. More dashboards. More cookies. More clicks. More audiences. More algorithms. If a customer sneezed on Instagram, somebody somewhere built a dashboard to measure the sneeze. Then came AI, promising to tidy up the mess. There is, however, a major problem. AI isn’t intelligent enough to have any idea who your customer is.
That is the surprising insight emerging from new research by the American Marketing Association (AMA). Its 2026 study of 203 US B2C marketers points to what it calls an “identity gap”. Overall, 53% of marketers considered their marketing highly effective. But among those using identity resolution, 64% said they were highly effective at reaching individual prospects, compared with just 31% among those without it. For personalised campaigns, the gap was 68% versus 39%. Looks like marketing seems to work well, until you ask it to recognise the same customer twice.
And that should worry Indian CMOs. India has inadvertently created one of the world’s most complicated marketing laboratories. The same consumer can discover a product on Instagram, search for reviews on Google, watch a YouTube video, ask someone on WhatsApp, visit the brand website, abandon the purchase, see another advertisement, and finally buy the product from a shop three days later. Six interactions. Five platforms. One human being. The MarTech stack may believe these are six separate humans.
This is the identity problem. Instead of obsessing with knowing what a device did, marketing should focus on what the prospect was trying to do. That distinction matters enormously because AI can target, recommend, personalise, predict and automate at astonishing speed, and if the underlying customer identity is fractured, AI doesn’t repair the problem. Garbage-in-garbage-out syndrome at full throttle.
Indian CMOs already know of the data problem. An MMA–EY study found that 56% reported gaps in consumer data that made data-driven decision-making difficult, despite 73% using a combination of first- and third-party data. A BCG research found that 96% of Indian consumers surveyed were comfortable with companies using publicly available information to create customised experiences… the highest proportion among the countries studied. Yet, consumers want brands to know them without invading privacy.
Globally, two-thirds of consumers reported experiencing personalisation they considered inaccurate or invasive. What they say is: “Know me. Just don’t get creepy.” That should probably become the first rule of AI marketing.
The second is even simpler: start with the person, not the platform. A customer isn’t a cookie. Nor is she a mobile ID, browser, CRM entry or WhatsApp number. She is someone who may be researching a refrigerator on Tuesday and a school for her child on Wednesday. Context, intent and history matters.
Personalisation is not about sticking her first name into an email. Instead, arketers must make the next interaction more useful to show that the brand understands what happened before. Deloitte says 45% of Indian consumers expect brands to anticipate their needs and communicate proactively. The same applies to targeting. AI makes it wonderfully easy to bombard the wrong person with the right advertisement. Buy a pair of running shoes and suddenly every device in your house apparently believes you are preparing for the marathon. Search for a TV and spend the next six months being offered TV deals. More AI does not necessarily mean more insight.
Measurement is another problem. Marketers love impressions, clicks and engagement but none of them brings revenue or indicate loyalty. Attrition continues. If the same customer appears as three different people across three platforms, marketers can end up congratulating themselves for acquiring customers it already had. That is why identity resolution matters.
But it also introduces issues related to privacy and DPDP Act. EY India found that 77% of Indian online shoppers expressed strong concern about data breaches, while 73% worried about their private information being disclosed. Yet 62% had made purchases influenced by AI recommendations. Indians are quite happy to let AI influence their shopping but considerably less enthusiastic about letting it rummage through their lives.
The winning brands must develop restraint. The temptation with AI is to collect everything because perhaps something useful will eventually emerge from it.. That’s digital hoarding, not customer insight. The smarter approach is to ask: “What do we actually need to know to make this customer’s experience better?” So think more about relationships, people, and whether the data collected tell a coherent story. Else the biggest marketing mistake of the AI era may be using an extraordinary machine to become extraordinarily efficient at misunderstanding customers.
For decades, marketing asked: How many people can we reach? Digital marketing asked: How precisely can we target them? Personalisation asked: How relevant can we become? AI now poses an embarrassing question: “Do you actually know who you’re talking to?” If the answer is no, perhaps the CMO doesn’t need another AI tool. She needs to meet the customer. The human being is still the most important data point in marketing. Everything else is just evidence
- Published On Sep 25, 2026 at 08:33 AM IST
