Data Privacy Trends: The Importance of User Privacy in Branding

Organizations often utilize data insights to boost personalization capabilities, target consumers, and produce consumer-centric products to enhance their business and overall user experience. While these initiatives have extreme business value, customers’ and employees' perceptions of the brand are dramatically influenced by how organizations use their personal information. In fact, recent data privacy trends show that buyers are actively prioritizing privacy with their wallets with the audiences most likely to actively embrace or quit a business depending on how they manage users' personal data are younger, wealthier, and purchase more online. This triple threat informs businesses that individuals who value their data are more likely to pick brands that fit the bill, and these buyers hold tomorrow's purchasing power. Therefore, to remain competitive in today's privacy landscape, companies must include data privacy and information management in their strategies.

Making the Most of Data Privacy Trends and Incorporating them in Brand Strategy

Users actively consider how a company's actions influence data protection and use these insights to determine the best privacy-friendly companies to engage with. Therefore, joining the data protection and transparency club by practicing the following may be a wise decision if you want to play in the same league as market leaders:

• Examine your data privacy procedures to determine if you can do anything to enhance them, such as collecting fewer data.

• Once you've evaluated your privacy policy, make it clear and straightforward, and explain how the data you're collecting will benefit the user.

• Hire dedicated data privacy compliance specialists to handle user information within the company.

• Invest in technology to bridge the gaps, assisting in identifying, managing, and remediating personally identifiable information (PII) throughout the enterprise.

• Remind your clients that the ball is always in their court by allowing them to manage their data easily on your website, fostering openness and confidence.

Not practicing the above may harm your brand and customer experience. Notably, 90% of consumers feel that how their data is dealt with reflects how they are treated as customers. Hence, the more secure the data, the more secure your customers feel in supporting your organization. In other words, customers want transparency, and your data practices will reveal a lot about your business, even if you did not intend for them to.

At the end of the day, organizations have to constantly weigh privacy against value. The data ownership revolution assures that whatever data users provide is traded for actual value from a service or product. However, keep in mind that by asking for extra information, it may be more difficult to persuade a client of the value they will get in exchange.

Don't Forget About Compliance

While not every user will be a detective trying to uncover exactly how a business uses their information, they will certainly notice when it reaches the headlines—especially when slapped with a fine. Privacy regulators, such as the European 'Union's General Data Protection Regulation, have become increasingly more stringent with the fines they hand out. These large fines are not only monetarily expensive, but they also come with a huge cost to customer perception that may be challenging to recover from. Therefore, organizations that want to keep and grow their brand should embrace and prioritize privacy throughout the enterprise.

data privacy GDPR information governance PII privacy

Bivek Minj graduated from the Indian Institute of Mass Communication with a degree in English Journalism. He serves as a Content Writer at ZL Tech India's Marketing department. He comes to the industry with a desire to learn and grow.