The Goldilocks Principle: Getting personalization just right

Personalization is one of those strategies that can easily go too far or not far enough. In this article, part of our ongoing personalization guide, we explore how to get it ‘just right’ with The Goldilocks Principle. We’re excited to have Dimitri Quadflieg from Wefuse share his perspective on how businesses can maximize impact without overcomplicating their personalization efforts.

There is this movie called Minority Report. If you haven’t seen it, it might be worth swapping one of your Netflix-and-chill nights to give it a watch. The story is set in a future where Big Brother (Precrime) knows what you are going to do before you even do it. It is based on the 1956 novel The Minority Report by Philip K. Dick.

There is one scene that always sticks with me. John Anderton, played by Tom Cruise, is on the run (and who doesn’t love a movie with Tom Cruise running 🤣). As he goes through a mall, cameras scan his eyes and identify him. Suddenly, an ad pops up. “John Anderton, you could use a Guinness right about now.”

That is personalization cranked up to eleven. Predicting not only what you want, but inserting you right into the experience. Helpful, or a little too close for comfort. That is exactly the tension brands face today.

It is funny sometimes how sci-fi novels have a way of predicting the future. We are not there yet. But we might not be as far away as you think.

A funny note, writing this intro made me buy the movie again and was watching it while writing the rest of this piece. Nostalgia!

#Why personalization matters in 2025

A decade ago, personalization meant nothing more than dropping a first name into an email subject line, or rendering your unique username on the header. Hi [Name] was enough to feel clever. Today, that barely scratches the surface. Customers now expect a cohesive experience that recognises them across every channel; web, app, store, and service.

The days of one-size-fits-all are gone. Generic homepages, blanket email blasts, and repetitive retargeting feel lazy and disconnected. People notice, and they switch brands.

The numbers prove it. 89% of business leaders say personalization will be critical to their success in the next three years. And customers agree – omnichannel personalization is now the expectation, not the exception. Whether it is Spotify curating your playlist, a grocery app reminding you of what you buy most, or a B2B wholesaler prompting a timely reorder, relevance is what keeps people engaged.

At the same time, the pressure is mounting. 85% of businesses are already adjusting their strategies to meet the expectations of Gen Z, a generation that values authenticity, speed, and digital experiences that feel seamless. They don’t want to be treated as part of a demographic bucket. They want experiences that feel like they were made for them.

Personalization is no longer a tactic. In 2025 and beyond, it is the foundation of customer experience, loyalty, and growth. To a point, personalization goes beyond loyalty. It moves to companionship. Brands evolving with their customers.

#What does it mean to get it right: The Goldilocks Principle

We all perceive experiences differently. The way I perceive an experience does not necessarily mean you, the reader, would react to it the same way. We all have our own fingerprint.

This is where the Goldilocks Principle comes in. Personalization can be too cold. Generic and irrelevant. It can be too hot. Over-engineered and invasive. Or it can be just right. Relevant without being creepy. Useful without being overwhelming.

As Nick Tran, named one of Forbes’ Most Influential CMOs, put it:

There is also another idea that ties neatly into this. The Diderot Effect. Denis Diderot wrote about how buying one new thing often leads us to buy more, because we want everything to feel coherent. One purchase creates a ripple of new choices. In the context of personalization, that is powerful. Suggesting the right “next thing” can help customers discover products that make sense in their world. But there is a line. Push too far, and it stops being helpful. It becomes manipulative.

It is a bit like those old Windows ’98 pop-ups. You close one, and another one appears with that same dinging bell. At first it is funny, then it is annoying, and before long you just want to pull the plug.

That balance is what brands need to master. Not too little. Not too much. Just right. But here is the real challenge. What is “just right” for one brand is not always “just right” for another.

So how do we define “just right”?

At its core, it is about finding the balance between relevance, trust, and timing, without tipping into over-engineering or intrusion.

Personalization has clear business impact early on, but the returns level off as you increase granularity. Beyond a certain point, going more granular delivers little additional value and can even reduce ROI. The key is finding the balance where personalization is ‘just right'.

#How does the Goldilocks Principle work?

Getting personalization “just right” depends on balancing a few key levers. Together, these act as the guiding principles of the Goldilocks Principle:

• Signals: the cues customers give you, from clicks and searches to context and behaviour.
  Example: a B2C shopper browsing running shoes leaves a different signal than a B2B buyer reordering bulk stock. Each signal should guide what comes next.
• Timing: showing up at the right moment in their journey.
  Example: a cart reminder the next day feels helpful. A push notification 30 seconds after abandoning the cart feels pushy.
• Trust: respecting consent, privacy, and their comfort zone.
  Example: offering personalized recommendations on your site is fine. Scraping private conversations to target ads is not.
• Intrusion: the more invasive it feels, the less relevant it becomes.
  Example: instead of retargeting me endlessly with hundreds of the same product, help narrow the paradox of choice. Show me fewer, more meaningful options that complement what I already bought. Think of the Diderot Effect – one purchase can naturally lead to the next, if it feels coherent rather than forced.
• Frequency: even relevant content becomes noise if it is delivered too often.
  Example: one well-timed email about a seasonal offer works. Ten emails in a week feels like spam, no matter how personalised.

When these principles are in balance, the outcome is relevance; personalization that feels natural, human, and valuable.

#How WeFuse applies the Goldilocks Principle

At WeFuse, we use this principle as a lens when guiding brands. For us, personalization is not about how much data you can collect or how many triggers you can automate. It is about how to fuse brand, marketing, and technology into an experience that feels just right for your customer.

• Brand defines the purpose: why you exist, what you stand for, and the story you want to tell.
• Marketing shapes the message: making sure creative and content are relevant, contextual, and aligned to your audience.
• Tech enables the scale: connecting data, platforms, and feedback loops to keep experiences consistent across every channel.

When these three come together under the Goldilocks Principle, you don’t just personalise. You build trust. You drive loyalty. You make your brand unforgettable.

#Challenges brands face in getting personalization right

On paper, personalization sounds simple. Use data. Add some AI. Deliver a tailored message. In reality, it is anything but. Brands run into the same obstacles again and again. There are the generic ones such as fragmented-systems, data silos, analytic gaps and legislation. But some of the real-world challenges we have experienced go deeper. Too little personalization feels lazy. Too much feels creepy. Somewhere in the middle is the balance, but finding it is the hard part.

Activating the digital experience

Every business is unique, and what works for one brand can fail for another. Activating personalization starts with a unified data strategy. Systems need to communicate seamlessly so every touchpoint feels connected. The key is to keep the architecture simple. More tools without proper integration only create silos and complexity. For this to work, data must also be clean and structured. Only then can content be matched to the right audience through a well-designed taxonomy.

Content without context

This is the silent killer of personalization. You might know who the customer is, but if the creative misses the mark and the experience feels flat. Two shoppers can look at the same product and expect completely different things. One might respond to imagery and storytelling that reflects their cultural background, while another connects more with values of sustainability or community. When the wrong version shows up, it feels irrelevant or even tone-deaf. We see this often in retail, where brands push generic global campaigns without adapting visuals or messaging to local cultures and communities.

Slow to adapt

Personalization is not set-and-forget. It demands speed and the ability to adapt to signals in real time. If a customer ignores an offer three times, the system should learn and stop pushing it. If someone shows strong interest in a new category, that signal should reshape what they see next. Think of Netflix: if you skip a show three times, you never want to see it again. But many eCommerce systems still keep forcing the same product until the customer walks away.

It is not only about connecting streams of data. Content also needs to keep up. If creating or managing variants is too complex, teams cannot move at the pace customers expect. The easier it is to adapt content – swapping creatives, updating messaging, creating variants for different audiences – the faster brands can respond to real signals in the journey.

For a more detailed breakdown of the challenges brands run into with personalization, head over to our article The Challenges Brands Face in Getting Personalization Right on the WeFuse site.

#The future of personalization: Data, AI, and human insight in balance

Let’s take a step back to the intro where I recalled that moment in Minority Report. Sci-fi novels, movies, and shows have always painted visions of the future. Advertising so personal it follows you around. Think Black Mirror, with ads flashing in your peripheral vision as you walk. These ideas have been around for decades.

But what does the near future really look like? I don’t want to lean too far into the sci-fi novelist in me. Instead, let’s be real about what’s possible now.

Solely relying on AI carries major risks when there is no human oversight. A recent case with Shein, the Chinese fast-fashion giant, showed how quickly things can go wrong. The brand was criticised after a shirt listing appeared to use the likeness of Luigi Mangione, an accused murderer, as a model image. The photo was widely speculated to have been AI-generated. Two things made this problematic: it seemed to use a real person’s portrait without consent, and it chose someone linked to a highly controversial case. Even though the listing was removed, it highlighted the risks of using AI without proper guardrails.

I also saw this in a smaller way myself. The other day I logged onto an eCommerce site to buy something my wife had asked for. Within minutes I was served a recommendation that felt spot-on. Was it based on my habits, or hers? Either way, it worked. That is the messy reality of data today.

The future of personalization is not just about more data. It is about building a unified data strategy that makes information useful, connected, and on brand. AI can then amplify it with accuracy and scale – but always with human insight to steer the result. And at the centre of it all, clear taxonomy models are what allow content to match cleanly with audiences, making the experience feel seamless rather than stitched together.

What is a unified data strategy?

A unified data strategy is the foundation of modern personalization. It ensures that data is not just collected, but structured, connected, and usable across the business. The goal is simple: make sure every system talks to each other, so every touchpoint feels connected.

Here’s how it works in practice:

1. Collect: Capture the signals from every interaction, from browsing behaviour to purchase history online and offline..
2. Unify: Break down silos. Bring data together into a single customer view.
3. Empower: Clean, structure, and enrich data so it can be trusted and used effectively.
4. Activate: Use the insights to deliver the right content, offer, or experience in the right channel.
5. Amplify: Distribute and let AI scale and optimize, but always with human oversight to stay on brand and ethical.

#Getting started with personalization and a headless CMS

When most brands think about personalization, their first instinct is to look at data. Who the customer is, what they bought, what they clicked. But personalization is not just about knowing. It is also about showing. And this is where content management makes or breaks the experience.

A headless CMS like Hygraph plays a critical role. In a composable stack, the CMS is not just a content repository. It becomes the orchestrator that matches the right content entry to the right audience at the right moment.

#Best practices for content personalization in a CMS

1. Model once, use many times
   Imagine one content entry, replicated across multiple locales and mapped to different taxonomies. Instead of rewriting from scratch, you define attributes (audience, channel, intent) and reuse the entry everywhere it’s needed.
2. Keep it simple for content managers
   The best modelling makes it easy for marketing teams to create and publish without worrying about technical rules. Tags and attributes should be intuitive, not overwhelming.
3. Localise with intelligence
   A single product entry can serve different markets by linking to local imagery, language, or cultural cues – all driven by the same structured model.
4. Focus on variants, not duplicates
   Don’t create five different versions of the same content manually. Create one entry with variants attached, mapped to audience signals.
5. Build for flexibility
   The customer needs to shift. A well-designed CMS makes it simple to update content or add new variants without breaking the system.
6. Maintain a single source of truth
   When multiple systems are involved; CDPs, CRMs, ERPs, ATSs, analytics, personalization engines, taxonomy can quickly splinter. In some cases across locales or regions. A headless CMS can act as the central hub, ensuring that attributes and mappings stay consistent across platforms. This avoids the “multiple versions of the truth” problem and guarantees that content, data, and audiences align no matter where they are activated.

Model once, create variants

With Hygraph’s new feature, you don’t need to duplicate content across endless entries. You start with a single content entry – for example, a product, a case study, or a blog post. From there, you can create variants within the same entry, aligned to your taxonomy.

That taxonomy could be:

• Audiences (first-time visitors, loyal customers, B2B buyers)
• Industries (retail, finance, healthcare)
• Signals (intent, behaviour, engagement level)
• Locales (languages, cultural context, regional compliance)

Each variant adapts the content for its context while still being tied to the original entry. This means:

• One product entry can hold lifestyle imagery for consumers, technical specs for B2B buyers, and market insights for industry-specific clients.
• Localisation happens inside the same entry. No more messy duplication across multiple markets.
• Content managers do not have to juggle different entries. They just add or update variants, keeping everything structured and consistent.

This is where personalization becomes practical. You model once. You manage once. And the CMS delivers many.

#Conclusion

As technology scales and innovation accelerates, the possibilities for personalization grow with it. We can always push the boundaries, but the responsibility lies with us as brands, agencies, and technologists to know where to draw the line.

Personalization is not about showing how much we know. It is about showing that we care. Done right, it enhances experiences, builds trust, and creates lasting connections. Done wrong, it turns relevance into noise and innovation into intrusion.

The Goldilocks zone is where personalization feels natural, useful, and human. Not too little. Not too much. Just right.