Why marketeers need to see privacy through a different lens

Could your business benefit from using privacy as a market differentiator to drive growth? 

We're challenging marketing professionals to consider privacy through a different lens - to consider the opportunity it presents when used as a market differentiator. We feel this is especially true for consumer-facing businesses, but increasingly too for B2B marketeers as well.

It is our belief that organisations that invest in better privacy practices will more than reap the benefits in terms of improved levels of customer trust and loyalty and thus increased sales and profits. And perhaps more importantly, that these businesses should use their competitive position and superior trustworthiness to form the basis of a focused marketing campaign to communicate this new positioning to consumers.

Turning the tables on the way privacy is perceived

At Securys, we believe that privacy can be a very effective market differentiator; both a selling point and a recruitment tool and that organisations who adopt privacy as both an ethical principle and a selling proposition will outperform their competitors. 

As a consultancy, our experience has been that a lot of businesses have historically approached privacy as a compliance issue – something they must do as a response to legislation and regulatory pressure. This isn’t a bad thing in itself, but it can lead to a tendency for privacy to be both too legalistic and budget-constrained and may cause a degree of resentment from the rest of the business. 

We're challenging marketing teams to think and act differently, encouraging them to view privacy as an enabler to build customer trust and loyalty. We provide our Privacy Made Positive® research as evidence.

Ethical companies outperform

Our Privacy Made Positive® programme, launched in 2020, provides clear evidence of the financial and employment outperformance by ethical companies. We summarised our findings into an eBook (Phase 1) which can be downloaded here.   

Consumers care about privacy

In 2021, we complemented this with our own consumer research in partnership with Kantar.  Our survey covered more than 4,000 respondents across the UK,  Ireland, France and Germany. 

We asked 10 questions, but the three key ones were:

1. Have you ever chosen a product or service because of better privacy?
2. Have you ever not completed the purchase of a product or service because of privacy concerns?
3. Have you ever stopped buying a product or using a service because you became concerned about privacy? 

In all three cases, about 70% of respondents replied in the affirmative. Around two fifths of them said that they took these actions frequently. More generally the level of interest in and concern about privacy was high, and significantly higher than had been shown in some previous studies. 

To read the full survey results, download the accompanying Phase 2 eBook which summarises our findings.  

What about US consumers?

Partnering again with Kantar, we have recently conducted research with 3,000 consumers across the US, where privacy is a more complex landscape. The results of this research are being revealed in the forthcoming webinar we are hosting in conjunction with the AMA.

Those that register for the webinar will automatically get a copy of the eBook on the US market. 

• To find out more about our Privacy Made Positive® programme, download our ebooks.
• To find out more about Securys and the other services we provide, visit www.securys.co.uk.