Marketing’s New “P” Privacy

Marketing’s New “P” Privacy

As marketing professionals, we’ve all grown up with the four, or more recently, the five Ps of marketing – product, price, placement, promotion, and peoplke.  But now there’s a new P of marketing in town,  and this is the most important one of all; Privacy.

The Ps of marketing are from a bygone age where communications were limited to postal mail, phone calls, and sales outlets, and tracking was limited to computer capacity.  But this has long since changed.  Despite the plethora of new technologies in their marketing stack, marketers are still playing catch-up.  In fact, many are so far behind that the regulators are stepping in to protect consumer privacy because brands can’t be trusted.

And here lies the problem.

Privacy: The Foundation of Everything

Everything we know about customer experience tells us that TRUST is the foundation for everything.  Yet, legislators and privacy advocates scream that marketing needs to be regulated to ensure that minimum data privacy standards are upheld.  Really?

Surely this is upside down for a digital world.  Shouldn’t we be starting with trust and building on this without the obligation of privacy regulation?  And with new generations of consumers becoming savvier, the focus on privacy is more intense than ever.

Dodging the Digital Backlash

If brands are to prevent a digital backlash from their most lucrative buyers, they need to build trust.  And they need to do it now.

With the implementation of GDPA in the EU (2018) and the recent introduction of CCPA in California, brands are suddenly jarred awake to the realities of privacy regulation and compliance.

But with many marketers, as soon as they’ve caught up with one set of regional regulations, the next one comes down the line; it’s the digital version of marketing playing whack-a-mole.

Beyond Basic Privacy Compliance

There is a better way for marketers to get ahead of the curve.  Marketers need to build a framework that is flexible and agile enough to quickly accommodate changes in customer data privacy regulations whenever they change, or with the introduction of new ones.  But the more important aspect of this approach is to place trust at the forefront of your marketing and customer experience strategy.

For example, 4Thought Marketing created 4Comply – a solution aimed at Oracle Marketing Cloud (Eloqua) users who want to remove marketing from playing legal whack-a-mole from their core competencies and embed privacy best practices into the fabric of their brand.  But building a trusted relationship needs a whole lot more than just meeting privacy compliance basics.

The next step is to transfer control to your customers, offering the ability for customers to control precisely how your brand interacts with them.  Everything from the frequency of contact to the subject matter and medium of communication.  But, this is easier said than done.  Give your customers too much work to do and they’ll throw their hands up and walk away.  Ask them questions that are too intrusive, and they might be offended.  This is why data privacy management goes hand-in-hand with Subscription Management when it comes to building trust.

Marketing’s Trust-Leadership Challenge for Privacy

In these days of increasing data privacy regulation, there is a golden opportunity for marketers to take a customer experience, leadership position by putting TRUST at the forefront of the relationship. By being the champions of establishing trust, you build a strong foundation for customer loyalty.  By setting the bar high, and putting strong governance in place, you insulate your brand from the endless conveyor belt of privacy regulation.  The sooner you act, the easier it will be.

To find out more about how you can turn data privacy compliance into enduring customer trust and loyalty, download our free eBook, “Achieving Trust Through Compliance. A Marketer’s Guide to Customer Data Privacy.”