Preparing your organization for the privacy-safe personalization era

CMO’s today are tasked with the dual challenge of delivering personalized experiences while upholding privacy compliance at its highest standards.

The rapidly evolving privacy ecosystem across the globe is accelerating the shift towards architecting and delivering privacy-safe personalized experiences.

On the contrary, consumers surveyed globally believe there is a significant gap between the actual experiences' brands deliver and the brand’s perception of the quality of experiences delivered vs reality. Let’s call this the brand experience gap.

Based on experience advising global brands on how to find the right balance between delivering personalized experiences while ensuring utmost diligence in managing customer privacy and compliance, here are a few key pointers to consider while developing your personalization capability blueprint.

Assess your organization’s privacy-safe personalization readiness

• Develop a framework to assess your organization’s privacy readiness to navigate the changing landscape of customer privacy, consent and compliance.

• Analyse the results of your privacy readiness assessment and identify the gaps in your current privacy & consent ecosystem across the core areas of technology, data, operating model, and team skills.

• Now that you’ve identified the capability gaps, the next action would be to build a roadmap to improve your privacy readiness over the next 6 –12 months and ongoing.

• The key final step is to ensure that you have built the business case to embark on the privacy readiness journey by partnering with the right stakeholders within the organization who can champion the privacy safe personalization mandate and bring the roadmap to life.

Take inventory of your customer data ecosystem

• Understand the various sources of 1st party and Zero party customer data that are being collected by your organization.

• The next step is to assess your customer data architecture from data collection, cleansing, transformation, storage through to the development of the right customer data models required for data-driven marketing execution.

• Once you’ve mapped your current customer data ecosystem architecture, the next step is to decide on a future-proof approach to manage your customer data effectively using the right customer data architecture.

• Customer data required to power data-driven marketing can be managed effectively by either leveraging an OOTB (Out-of-the-box) Customer Data Platform or by building your own bespoke customer data architecture on cloud.

• A key consideration to keep in mind while selecting and implementing a customer data management solution is to ensure that the platform enables easy management of customer preferences and consent by marketer’s within the organization.

Enable a transparent value exchange mechanism to collect customer data

Ensure that your customers clearly understand the value exchange behind every interaction that seeks customer data inputs. The relevant benefits of sharing their precious data need to be clearly articulated and expressed to your customers.

Rethink the KPI’s you track to measure success with customers

Reassess the marketing and advertising KPI’s and metrics you are currently using as a yardstick to measure success. Shift the focus towards life-time value metrics to enable a shift towards customer-centric strategy, planning, and execution of experiences.

In summary, enabling privacy-safe personalization requires brands to assess, plan, prioritize and execute on a clearly defined roadmap encompassing the data, content, technology, operating model and most importantly the right skills required to deliver customer experiences at scale while truly respecting the consumers privacy preferences.