Privacy in Marketing

As marketing strategy evolves overtime, the onus is on the to make sure that the privacy of the consumers is being looked after in the right manner. Additionally, with the advent of the internet, privacy issues and concerns of the users are going to magnify with the passage of time.  The problem often lies in the unawareness of the marketers on customers’ privacy, and at times, they delve into the personal lives of the consumers and try to extract information that is not ethical. Unethical use of information means that the consumer themselves are not willing to share certain information (Holtrop et al., 2017). As customers are becoming more aware of their privacy, however, things have started to change and therefore, organisations have started to develop strategies to address consumers’ privacy (Gana & Koce, 2016).  Some of the strategies that can be used by the organisation would be discussed here.

Bringing transparency into the use of customers’ information is one of the strategies that organisations use to maintain customers’ privacy by eliminating the chance of delivering misleading message. Considering this advantage, many tech savvy customers might be willing to compromise their privacy for the sake of knowing how the personal information is going to be used.  Whatever the situation is, the customer needs to be aware of how their privacy can be ensured in variety of methods. The dialogue boxes for instance, can be provided to the visitors as well as providing complete transparency when it comes to the way data collection is carried out (Gana & Koce, 2016). With regards to social media use, the other thing that can be done is avoiding a third party tagging by bringing better settings as well as by ensuring the use of the third party tags. At the same time, effort must be made to make sure that whatever the information is being used, any unusual behaviour must be taken care of. In order to achieve that, the organisations must develop policies regarding the third party tagging and ensure that there is no slip up the way they are being done.

The recent trend had emerged where brands started to share customers’ information with the third party users, which is an unethical practice that must be abolished (Gonen & Tassa, 2016). Marketers can enhance their way of approaching the target consumer by using market optimisation solutions. Market optimisation can help in making sure that unethical use of the information pertaining to the consumer can be worked out. This will eventually help in achieving desired business outcomes whilst allowing the marketers to ensure the privacy of the consumer.  The marketers must make try to generate information during the course of marketing process, allowing greater attention to detail. Once the information has been used, the effort must be made to make sure that all the respective trails about the consumers’ information are done away with.

Using technology that is privacy conscious is another strategy that is used by the marketers to support the regulations that are pertaining to the E-Privacy (Holtrop et al., 2017). The technology should ideally be responding to all the people who are part of different jurisdiction, and allows the consumers’ privacy preferences to be set accordingly (Gonen & Tassa, 2016). Moreover, the changing landscape of the E-Privacy regulations is going to play a huge part in the development and improvement of consumers’ privacy regulation.  United Kingdom for instance, has made great strides in data protection regulation, which hopefully becomes a role model for the United States and rest of Europe.

     Finally, the best thing that the marketer can do is to win the trust of the consumer by making sure that all information is securely kept (Figure 4). Even if there is a case where information is disclosed, the marketers should let the consumers know whenever the information is being used.  This would give the brand some additional credibility and the level of trust that consumers are going exhibit over the brand. There is also an element of convenience to information storing. When a brand asks to store personal information online it’s easier for consumers who frequently shop on a site (Gana & Koce, 2016).  That allows the marketers to have information about the consumer, but effort must be made to ensure that privacy of the consumer is taken care off.

Gana, M. A., & Koce, H. D. (2016). Mobile Marketing: The influence of trust and privacy concerns on consumers’ purchase intention. International Journal of Marketing Studies, 8(2), 121. Retrieved from http://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/ijms/article/view/58523

Gonen, R., & Tassa, T. (2016, August). Privacy preserving computations for viral marketing: the case of rational players. In Availability, Reliability and Security (ARES), 2016 11th International Conference on (pp. 677-686). IEEE. Retrieved from http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/7784633/

Holtrop, N., Wieringa, J. E., Gijsenberg, M. J., & Verhoef, P. C. (2017). No future without the past? Predicting churn in the face of customer privacy. International Journal of Research in Marketing, 34(1), 154-172. Retrieved from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167811616300805