A Fearless Marketer Balances Trust and Personalization

A Fearless Marketer Balances Trust and Personalization

As marketing leaders across the globe descend upon Marketo’s Marketing Nation Summit 2018 this week in San Francisco, this year’s theme of the “Fearless Marketer” is resonating acutely with marketers across disciplines and industries.

As Marketo CEO and fellow SAP alum Steve Lucas puts it, “The Fearless Marketer takes on the opportunities and challenges we face in the frenetic pace of our digital world.” Indeed, the pace of change only accelerates and with marketing playing an increasingly critical role partnering with sales teams to drive customer engagement and loyalty, it’s a good time to address the elephant in the room.

It’s a trust tension. On one hand, consumers expect ever-more personalized, customized experiences that delight and engage, and on the other, data privacy concerns are top of mind with recent high-profile breaches of trust and the GDPR around the corner. Marketers are at a crossroads and need guidance on how to navigate these seemingly opposing priorities.

While customer data is arguably a company’s most valuable asset, trust is the currency that drives sustainable business. Trust is everything and is built up over months or years. It can be broken in seconds and never regained. All the data you have collected on your customer proves worthless if they lose faith in your brand, or worse, in you personally.

Consumers aren’t stupid. We trade information about ourselves in return for a better experience, a customized product or relevant information tailored to what we love and care about, but not at any cost. We only should share if we can control and understand what’s happening with our data. In the past, we didn’t think about this much. And there is certainly a generational difference at play, but over the last several years as social media became interwoven into our lives we lost our way for a while. We really didn’t think about the implications of giving up too much.

Well, as it turns out – we do care, and our priorities are shifting. I believe we are entering a new period of rebalancing these priorities – away from convenience at any cost, and towards trust and privacy weighing heavily on our decisions.

Marketers are at a watershed moment: on one hand, we strive to deliver hyper-personalized experiences, and on the other we need to do so with the utmost trust and concern for consumer privacy. And the issues around consumer privacy are not only highlighted by the recent outcry over Facebook’s data sharing policies, but also in the current privacy regulations gaining traction across continents. One of these is the GDPR, which threatens to make matters more complicated for marketers and substantially more fearful than fearless. Penalties will become the new norm, and companies will see their business grind to a halt – or even shut down entirely.

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But we see a new emotion from marketers that is replacing trepidation. It’s confidence.

Confidence that fearless does not mean reckless. An attitude that puts a customer-first priority on never violating trust. Responsible marketers are professionals whose practices are rooted in values, trust and respect, tied together by diligent people using compliant processes and secure systems – the types that are developed with privacy in mind.

My team and I at Treasure Data come to Marketing Nation with a clear message. A Fearless Marketer will be rewarded with customer trust if – and only if – they balance personalization with responsibility. The Fearless Marketer acknowledges their martech stack’s ability to deliver this insight is only as good as the data going into it and has no fear the data is accurate, complete, compliant and secure. The Fearless Marketer has the trust and confidence that the data they use to inform their programs has been collected with proper consent, and any use of that data is in the best interest of the customer first and foremost.

Marketers have been plagued by the challenge of uniting scattered data silos, easily stitching together unstructured data, and trusting that the data is complete and accurate, all while ensuring that it was collected responsibly. The ability to have a 360° view of customers to truly understand what they need and efficiently engage with them is any marketer’s wish.

With our DNA in big data management, we put into the hands of marketers the most talked-about category in big data capabilities – the enterprise customer data platform. By enabling the responsible collection of data from any source, we connect our customers to their customers in a way they never thought possible. We help fearless marketers overcome the classic struggle of fractured customer data and help them access the data they need to create compelling offers that delight and build customer loyalty and trust.

Stop by the Treasure Data booth #539 at the Marketing Nation Summit to meet us, get a demo and learn how Subaru, Wish.com and others embrace their previously disconnected customer data to future-proof their market dominance.

Rob Glickman
Rob Glickman
Rob serves as Head of Marketing, Data Business at Arm. Previously, he was VP of audience marketing at SAP where he led a global team of marketers chartered with driving modern marketing demand generation programs. He brings nearly 20 years of marketing experience ranging from lean startups to large enterprises, including running product marketing for Symantec, eBay and PayPal, where he held various marketing leadership roles globally.