How to Personalise To a Generation That Doesn’t Want You To Know Anything About Them

By Luke Brewin, Operations Director at Force24 

 

For context, I’m 30.

That puts me in an odd position generationally. Old enough to remember the internet before consent banners and cookie pop-ups were everywhere, but young enough to have spent most of my adult life navigating them as standard. I’ve clicked “accept all” more times than I care to admit, but I also understand why people don’t anymore.

I sit somewhere between the behaviours I’m describing in this article and the systems many organisations are still built around.

The title of this piece wasn’t mine originally. It came from a comment made during a roundtable we were hosting, said almost offhand, but it stuck with me. “How do you personalise to a generation that doesn’t want you to know anything about them?” It’s been rattling around in my head ever since, because it captures the tension better than any white paper or trend report I’ve read.

What follows isn’t an attempt to label or criticise a generation. It’s an attempt to make sense of a shift I’m seeing play out across customers, teams, and platforms. A shift in how value is exchanged, how trust is built, and how personalisation actually works when people understand what they’re giving up. That perspective shapes everything that follows.

The paradox

We are now marketing to the first generation that has never experienced the internet without consent.

They have grown up with pop-ups asking permission, privacy notices no one really reads, and an ambient understanding that their behaviour online is being tracked. Not in a conspiratorial way, just as a fact of life. They know what cookies are. They know what happens when they click “accept all”. Even if they don’t dwell on it, the mechanics are familiar. And increasingly, they choose not to play along.

Private browsing isn’t a workaround, it’s just how they browse. Ad blockers are installed early and never really questioned. Permissions are denied unless there’s a reason to allow them, and that reason needs to be obvious. This isn’t apathy or digital fatigue. It’s a quiet, practical decision about control. What complicates things is that this same group still expects things to feel personal.

They want relevance. They want to feel understood. They follow creators because the content feels like it fits them, not because the creator knows who they are. The language is right. The timing is right. The tone doesn’t feel forced. So personalisation hasn’t gone away, it is just operating under very different terms.

 

The value exchange has changed

For a long time, personal data was something brands simply accumulated.

Email addresses were captured early. Behaviour was tracked quietly. Profiles grew deeper over time. The logic was simple enough: gather information now, deliver value later. In many cases, later never really arrived, but that wasn’t always obvious at the time. That logic relied on passivity, and passivity has disappeared.

This generation treats personal data much more like time or money. If the return isn’t clear, or feels generic, the exchange doesn’t happen. A newsletter promising “updates” is not an incentive. A discount that applies to nothing relevant doesn’t feel generous. Early access to something they weren’t interested in anyway is easy to ignore.

What’s changed isn’t that people have become unwilling to engage. It’s that they’ve become more deliberate. They want to see the benefit now. They want to understand why something is being asked for and what will happen if they say yes. Handing over information just in case it becomes useful later feels like a bad deal.

So when brands talk about shrinking data pools or falling opt-in rates, what they’re often describing isn’t a rejection of personalisation, but a mismatch in value. The ask stayed the same. Expectations moved on.

 

Why expectations for personalisation keep rising

At the same time as people have become more selective, their expectations have quietly increased.

Much of this has been shaped by the environments they spend the most time in. Platforms like TikTok have normalised immediate relevance. You open the app and something feels right. Not because you filled in a form or set preferences, but because the system is responding to what you’re doing in the moment.

From the user’s perspective, it doesn’t feel like personalisation in the traditional sense. It feels more intuitive than that.

This has reset the baseline. Relevance is no longer impressive, it’s assumed. And the comparison set has shifted. Brand experiences aren’t measured against other brands anymore, but against platforms and creators who deliver alignment without friction. That’s an uncomfortable comparison.

When a brand follows up with generic messaging or recommendations that clearly miss the mark, the gap is obvious. It doesn’t feel invasive. It just feels lazy. If relevance can be achieved elsewhere without deep personal profiles, why does it fail so often when brands have far more declared information to work with?

Part of the answer lies in what’s being prioritised. Many platforms focus less on who someone is and more on what they’re doing right now. Brands, by contrast, are often still anchored to historic segmentation and long-lived profiles.

 

Where brands keep getting this wrong

Faced with all of this, many organisations respond in predictable ways.

As access to data becomes more constrained, the instinct is to ask for more of it, earlier. Longer forms. Stronger prompts. More persistent consent requests. There’s a sense that if the picture can just be rebuilt, things will start working again. But the certainty those profiles once promised is gone.

Doubling down on historic data often leads to experiences that feel overconfident. Messages arrive with authority but little accuracy. Recommendations are delivered as fact rather than suggestion. Content assumes familiarity that hasn’t been earned. It’s not that brands know too much. It’s that they know too little, but speak as though they know everything.

Underneath this is a structural issue. Personalisation is still treated as a layer marketing applies once the core experience exists. Preference centres become static pages. Consent becomes a compliance exercise. In that context, even good intentions struggle to translate into good experiences. 

Situational beats historic personalisation

The assumption that personalisation has to start with a complete picture of the individual is becoming less useful.

For years, marketing was driven by accumulation. Gather enough data over time and clarity would follow. But accumulation depends on continuity and consent, both of which are now fragile. A situational approach starts somewhere else.

Instead of asking who someone is, it pays attention to what they’re doing. What they’re looking at. What they engage with. What they skip past. The signals that exist in the moment, rather than traits inferred from the past. This kind of relevance tends to feel lighter. Less declarative. More responsive. Suggestions make sense because they connect to what’s happening, not because a system claims deep understanding of the individual.

There’s also a trust element here. People can usually sense why something is being shown to them, even if it’s never spelled out. The logic feels visible. That matters in a consent-led environment, where heavy-handed certainty can quickly feel out of place.

 

Why this is a product problem, not a marketing problem

None of this can be solved by marketing alone. You can’t message your way out of a broken value exchange. Trust isn’t created by statements. It’s created by behaviour. If the experience itself doesn’t support relevance, control, and follow-through, optimisation won’t save it.

Personalisation lives inside the product.It shows up in when preferences are requested, how they’re used, and whether they’re respected later. It’s shaped by how quickly systems respond to change and how consistent the experience feels over time.

Too often, preference capture exists primarily to serve the business. In a consent-led environment, that imbalance is obvious. The same is true of transparency. Policies may meet legal requirements, but trust is built when changing a preference actually changes what happens next. That requires coordination across product, data, engineering, and customer experience. It also requires letting go of the idea that certainty is the goal. Responsiveness is often more valuable.

 

Earning relevance in a consent-led world

Personalisation isn’t disappearing. What’s disappearing is the assumption that it can be taken without permission. This generation understands leverage. They know when they’re being asked to give something up, and they expect the return to make sense. When it does, they’re not reluctant participants. They’re often engaged ones.

The brands that adapt won’t be the ones with the most detailed profiles. They’ll be the ones that know when to ask, when to wait, and when to simply respond to what’s already happening. That shift can feel uncomfortable, especially for organisations built on certainty and control. But it’s also an opportunity to build something more honest.

Relevance that’s earned rather than assumed tends to last longer. And it tends to feel better on both sides of the exchange.

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