Protecting customers’ privacy requires more than anonymising their data. Excellent article by Sachin Gupta and Matthew Schneider for Harvard Business Review
discussing the “trillion-dollar question” - whether businesses can “reap the promised benefits of data-driven marketing while maintaining the privacy of customers’ data”. 📊
Gupta and Schneider explain why current approaches to protecting data are “woefully inadequate” - as once “a company shares data either internally or externally, its ability to control access deteriorates rapidly”. Furthermore, pseudonymisation is “no longer sufficient” as the dataset can be combined with others, for example through a second-party data sharing partnership, to re-identify customers. 🕵️
The suggest companies should instead consider using statistical approaches - such as converting “the original data to synthetic data so they remain valuable for data-driven marketing, yet adequately protected”.
Despite GDPR, consumers still don’t understand how brands use their data. New research shows that there is a
growing gap in consumers’ understanding of how organisations use their data. Writing for Marketing Week,
Sarah Vizard summarises the key findings:
The survey, conducted by OnePoll for the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM), finds 48% of consumers do not understand where and how organisations typically use their personal data. That is up from 31% when the research was last conducted two years ago.
Just 7% feel they have a good understanding of how companies use their data, with 45% saying they “somewhat understand”. But less than a fifth (18%) believe businesses treat people’s personal data in an honest and transparent way.
A third of consumers (29%), say they have received communication from a business they did not give permission to contact them in the past month, while 19% believe they have received something in the past six months and 13% in the past year. Just 17% believe they have never been contacted by a brand without their permission, while 17% are unsure.
Think Tank: New age of retailing and big data analytics. Vic Bageria, chief executive and chief visionary officer of
Xpandretail, discusses the
future of retail and the impact of data analytics in a piece for Women’s Wear Daily.
Bageria argues that retailers need to move from predictive to prescriptive analytics, and to use data analytics to optimise product assortment and store operations. The ability to “forecast demands and shopping patterns” should also be used to improve efficiencies with suppliers. 📈
Retailers should also be deploying technology which automates the bringing together and analysis of data from omnichannel touch points, to get “a holistic view of their brand’s overall performance”. Bageria concludes:
Because data analytics ensures that in-demand items will be in stock, prices are adjusted in real time and deliver relevant and timely promotions — consumers will benefit from a smarter, more pleasant shopping experience. Retail data analytics is not just a competitive edge anymore, rather a necessary tool to compete with other retailers.
