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David Carl Edelman, Executive Advisor, Independent Board Member, HBS Fellow, Author, is a sought-after advisor on digital transformation and marketing. As CMO, David guided Aetna (now part of CVS Health) through becoming a digitally-oriented, customer-centric brand. Repeatedly recognized by Forbes as one of the “Most Influential CMOs in the World,” and by AdWeek as one of the “Top 20 Marketing and Technology Executives,” his work has attracted over 1.1 million followers to his LinkedIn blog. He has keynoted over one hundred events around the world in his 30+ years of public speaking. Currently, David advises top executives on AI and personalization, working with Enterprise, PE-backed, and VC-backed companies (especially as a member of Glasswing Ventures’ Advisory Board), and as a Senior Advisor with BCG. He has also been a Professor at Harvard Business School. His bestselling book, “Personalized: Customer Strategy in the Age of AI,” was published by Harvard Business Review Press in October 2024, following his six articles in HBR on digital and AI transformation. In 2025, he was named a "Power 100 AI Trailblazer" by AdWeek, and a "Top Iconic Business Leader to Watch" by Enterprise World.

CMO COUNCIL: You talk a lot about how personalization is becoming a key competitive differentiator. Yet people have been talking about it for a while. How have the capabilities evolved, and why is it so important now?

EDELMAN: You are right that the idea itself is not new. I was writing about “segment of one” marketing decades ago. What has changed is the ability to execute personalization continuously, at scale, and at speed, throughout the customer experience. In the book, I describe how Netflix transformed entertainment not by having better content alone, but by building learning loops that adapt with every interaction. Netflix now creates hundreds of thousands of variations of trailers and recommendations, learning in real time what works for different people in different contexts. That kind of rapid experimentation and adaptation simply was not possible until AI, data infrastructure, and automation matured. It matters now because customers experience that responsiveness directly. Once they do, slower and more generic experiences feel immediately outdated. For brands that have blended into our lives, such as Uber, Amazon, Netflix, and Spotify, personalization is at the root of the value they deliver.

CMO COUNCIL: Ok, I get that personalization at scale is more possible now than ever before. But how does it actually create advantage and what is the value of pursuing it?

EDELMAN: In our research, we invested in building a Personalization Index that we could correlate with financial performance, so we could answer that question with evidence, not anecdotes. In the book, we looked across hundreds of companies and assessed how well they delivered on what we described as the five promises of personalization (Empower Me, Know Me, Reach Me, Show Me, and Delight Me). What we found was striking. Companies that scored in the top quartile of the index consistently grew faster than their peers and generated meaningfully higher returns. The advantage did not come from having flashier technology. It came from being better at learning from customers and acting on that learning across the entire journey.

What really creates value is the compounding effect. Personalization leaders run many more experiments, learn faster from each interaction, and feed those learnings back into the system. That creates a flywheel. Each customer interaction makes the next one more relevant, more timely, and more efficient. Over time, this lowers the cost to serve, increases conversion and retention, and builds a base of customer insight that competitors cannot easily replicate.

Another important finding from the index is that the value of personalization shows up well beyond marketing metrics. Leaders are better at reducing friction, anticipating needs, and coordinating actions across channels. Customers notice that. In our consumer research for the book, people were remarkably consistent in saying that if a company has data about them, they expect it to be used to make their lives easier. When that expectation is met, trust and loyalty follow. That is why personalization becomes a durable competitive advantage rather than just a short-term revenue lift if done right.

CMO COUNCIL: What distinguishes leaders from laggards? What’s needed, as your HBR article says, for personalization to be “done right”?

EDELMAN: The biggest difference is that leaders treat personalization as a system, not a tactic. We introduced those five promises of personalization because so many companies were personalizing fragments of the journey, such as just focusing on timely outreach or tailored content, while disappointing customers overall. Sysco, the distributor of food and supplies to eating establishments, stands out because it invested early in building direct digital relationships with customers by strongly encouraging use of their app, gathering a wealth of information along the way, and then using those relationships to personalize offers, ordering, and loyalty in a coordinated way. It is not about clever messages. It is about delivering on implicit promises consistently across channels, and in Sysco's case, making it incredibly easy for customers to quickly find great deals, supplies to replenish, and new ideas, all explicitly tailored to their specific context, and all consistent across channels. Laggards tend to keep the silos that separate data across functions (Marketing, Sales, Billing, and Service, for example) and think about the customer experience as isolated interactions. Customers feel confused or overwhelmed.

CMO COUNCIL: What are the main hurdles to consider in advance, and how should companies start addressing them?

EDELMAN: The biggest hurdles are almost always about coordination and focus, not a lack of data or technology. In the book, we talk about Sephora as a great example of a company that understood this early. Sephora did not start by trying to personalize everything at once. Instead, it focused on building a strong foundation of customer relationships through its loyalty program and digital tools, then progressively connected data across online, mobile, and in-store experiences. That allowed Sephora to personalize product recommendations, content, and services like in-store consultations in a way that felt coherent rather than intrusive.

What Sephora avoided was the common trap of treating personalization as a series of disconnected initiatives owned by different teams. By sequencing its efforts and aligning teams around clear customer goals, it reduced internal friction and built trust internally as well as with customers. The hardest step for them was actually deciding that the customer relationship would be coordinated on behalf of the overall Sephora brand, not just the distinct product categories (skin care, cosmetics, fragrance, etc).

The lesson for most companies is to recognize how AI tears down boundaries. The data offers enormously more value when it is connected, and the experience becomes stickier when customers see how information is used to make everything simpler and coordinated.

CMO COUNCIL: What should be the role of the CMO in driving the strategy?

EDELMAN: Personalization creates an opening for the CMO to step up as the orchestrator of the broader strategy, not just the owner of campaigns. In both the book and my HBR work, we show that personalization leaders almost always treat this as an enterprise strategy with strong executive sponsorship. The CMO is uniquely positioned to frame personalization around customer value, to align teams across marketing, product, technology, and analytics, and to insist on learning as a discipline. The most effective CMOs I work with do not position personalization as a tech initiative. They position it as how the company competes and grows, and they hold the organization accountable for making customers’ lives easier at every step.