Consumer privacy, an increased responsibility for marketers now!

Consumer privacy, an increased responsibility for marketers now!

Privacy in marketing is all about data, specifically, an individual’s personal, identifiable data & how organizations collect it, use it, share it & forget it.

Customer centricity, omnichannel experiences & personalization cannot be achieved without consumer data. But with Big data comes huge responsibility.

According to a recent survey by Tinuiti, the top consumer concerns are:

• More than 50% of consumers agree that there’s no such thing as online privacy.
  

• Roughly 40% to 50% of people think their mobile phones are listening to them.
  

• 70% of consumers don’t like receiving targeted ads as a trade-off for providing their information.
  

• Over 40% of consumers are very worried about criminals gaining access to their data.

There is an increased need of educating consumers by marketers about how they use their data & what measures they take to protect it. Marketers need to be more transparent about how they use consumer data to personalize experiences. They should also be aware of the various existing privacy laws like the EU’s GDPR, Australia’s Consumer Data Right (CDR) law & California’s Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).

Businesses can seek help from technology when it comes to addressing privacy issues. For example, brands & publishers can take advantage of data “clean rooms.” Clean rooms are a type of privacy-enhancing technology (PET) that allows data owners to share customer first-party data in a privacy-compliant way. Clean rooms are secure spaces where first-party data from several brands can be resolved to the same customer’s profile while that profile remains anonymized.

Marketers should better understand how consumers feel about data, including what data they’re willing to share in exchange for incentives like discounts, freebies & convenience.

All of this requires that marketers create a privacy-first, resilient & transparent approach to data usage & data privacy. This will also ensure better control over consumer data collection preferences & usage if companies own data rather than relying on second- or third-party data for their marketing initiatives.