In his series of blog posts about why context matters, Jamie Smith writes:
I believe that personalisation goes wrong when no one’s asking about the customer’s context, or no one’s listening. It’s being sent a ‘targeted’ advert for a car, not knowing you just joined a car club. It’s being recommended a book on Amazon based on your shopping history, not knowing you actually hate the author (your previous purchase was for a friend). It’s being sent coupons for pregnancy products based on your shopping history, when you haven’t yet told your family you are expecting a baby.
The best reason I can think of as to why context matters is that the highest aspiration of technology is to recede into the fabric of life. Companies competing for our attention will soon find that we value much more those who compete for our inattention. Philips made a really cool smart LED light bulb but it cannot be operated from the switch in the wall. You must use an app to make it work. The bulb is great but the implementation is exceedingly dumb. At the very least, a new smart LED bulb should work exactly the same as a regular bulb because that’s how people know and expect to operate lighting. What’re we supposed to do? Duct-tape all our old iPhones to the wall next to a switch that has itself been duct-taped over?