Context Beats Creepy: A Human-AI Approach to Marketing

Contextual relevance is often more effective in marketing than personalisation at the top of the funnel.

Context Connects Us

What if the secret to better marketing isn't knowing more about individuals, but understanding the world they're operating in?

When you're presenting to new clients, their industry's latest challenges matter more than their personal LinkedIn profile. Mentioning context connects us; mentioning personal data can make us feel stalked.

Advertising and marketing that acknowledges seasonal cycles, news events, and trends helps me feel better informed and connected to others. When everything is hyper-personalised to me, I feel manipulated and isolated.

I’m not against personalization, but it shines later in the business cycle. I like personalisation in service and sales; I hate it in marketing and branding.

Using Marketing Intelligence with Restraint

Marketers can track nearly everything online—clicks, reading habits, local weather, time of day—and cross-reference it with demographic or psychographic data. AI turns this “big data” into “big knowledge,” as LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman puts it, letting us “chat” with datasets.

But just because you can hyper-personalize doesn’t mean you always should. HubSpot’s 2024 B2B Buyer Survey found that 75% of buyers prefer to research products independently, often seeking industry-relevant content like whitepapers or trend reports over personalized ads. Overusing personal data risks alienating prospects, not just ethically but in effectiveness. Contextual data makes you more likable, and preferred.

Personal data also has a coverage gap. Your top advocacy prospects may not be digitally active, but they’re all grappling with the same industry pressures. Context lays the foundation for trust, paving the way for personalization later.

So How to Personalise?

I'm not saying we shouldn't personalise. Personal data excels in transactional moments like, retargeting ads after someone visits a landing page. But for building initial trust and awareness, context wins.

The power to personalise should rest in the customer's hands. For instance, based on what I have specifically shared on web forms, my transaction history with you, or what I’ve mentioned in meetings. I’d expect you to remember that, as we get to know each other - this is the basis of loyalty. But that needs to come with time, and permission.

Savvy marketers ask questions clearly linked to better service. That’s a win-win.

Do's and Don'ts

Do's

• Spend more time reading industry publications than stalking executives' LinkedIn profiles

• Align campaigns with shared B2B contexts: industry-specific pain points, weather patterns, or news events

• Create content that resonates with collective challenges (e.g., webinars on new regulations)

• Empower human marketers to add individual touches after AI provides contextual insights

Don'ts

• Don't research someone's alma mater and hobbies before understanding their market pressures

• Don’t rely solely on individual data - it feels invasive, is often incomplete, and misses shared industry challenges.

• Don't ignore industry-specific contexts like budget cycles or regulatory changes

• Don't automate all interactions. Reserve human effort for authentic, relationship-driven connections

The Bottom Line

People don’t make decisions in a vacuum, they make them in context.
Personalisation can be really helpful at later stages of the business cycle, but contextual awareness and responsiveness is the key to personalising tastefully.

AI can help you discover more about your client’s industrial context, and help you create valuable content in response with more depth, speed, and accuracy than ever before.

With that in place, personalisation can be done tastefully.