In prior installments of the QT we liked to call out the “skimminess” of the format as a quick way into the important news nuggets of the day. Today, however, the news is more “chewable”, which is to say, the headlines are still quick-takes (QTs) but the nature of today’s items seem a bit more thinky. Lots to digest here.
Cheers to you.
TRUST
The Consumer and Brand Relationship Forever Changes: Trust becomes the ultimate non-negotiable
Quick Take: Consumers build trust in a brand when it delivers what it promises it will. According to Forrester, “consumer trust has always been important. But for 2021, consumer trust is underlined and bolded — nothing is more important for a brand’s survival.” Perhaps this is because during the pandemic, 66% of consumers could recall when brands acted in self-interest—such as raising prices on essential items, spurring 1 in 4 to walk away from a brand.
Key insights on consumer engagement in 2021
Quick Take: Consumers want to purchase from brands that align with their beliefs and are more conscious. In fact, organizations that better align consumers’ values are 2x as likely to outperform peers in revenue growth. A more human and value-driven approach will be at the heart of winning customer trust.
The Future Of Work Is About The Future Of Customer
Quick Take: Future-of-work discussions should be anchored in a business strategy that innovates without the boundaries of industries, technologies or expertise areas. It involves acquiring capabilities that are dissimilar or unnatural to your business. This can mean the difference between thinking like a siloed industry or thinking like a customer, because in a customer’s mind there are no boundaries.
CX
The pandemic broke NPS
Quick Take: According to a July 2020 report by Qualtrics’ XM Institute, aggregate NPS across 20 industries dropped more than 50% from May 2019 to May 2020. In a few related industries, for example, we find: Insurance is down 13 points; Auto dealers are down 22 points; and Rental cars and transportation are down 28 points.
CUSTOMER DATA
The case for retaining clients instead of finding new ones
Quick Take: “Getting data is hard,” he acknowledged. “Almost half of consumers strongly agree that the less data and a company has about them, the better.” To improve data-sharing, insurers need to increase the public’s trust in the industry, provide the benefits to consumers of acquiring their data, or show value in exchange for the data and make it easy to share.
Where next for ethical data and data privacy?
Quick Take: There will also be a trend towards corporations offering to hand back control of data to consumers, predicts Kingston. As he explains: “To develop trust within the customer experience in the competitive business landscape, businesses will start to offer consumers ownership and control of their personal data. By combining ethical, compliant, and privacy-preserving principles together with technology infrastructure built to scale for the future, data will begin to be seen as something of value to individuals and corporations.”
DATA PRIVACY
The terrifying amount of data Facebook Messenger
Quick Take: You don’t even have to read the contents of those privacy labels to realize how much data Messenger collects from every single user. Facebook Messenger manages to grab a terrifying amount of data when compared to the other three. Even WhatsApp, which belongs to Facebook, can’t match Messenger.
Data Privacy Abuse Continues Because We Struggle To Define The Problem
Quick Take: In my experience, many of these software solutions stamp on privacy contracts that divulge their collection of data but fail to explain what they plan to do with it. Businesses have been left questioning not only if their data is being sold, but also how it’s being securely stored.
PERSONALIZATION
Grading Your Marketing Personalization Strategy
Quick Take: According to Gartner, most marketers will have abandoned their personalization efforts in 2025 due to a lack of consistent ROI. Based on Gartner’s findings, marketers start their personalization efforts with great fanfare but end up burned out and casting personalization away after not seeing results.
Unlock The Power Of Personalization
Quick Take: In research conducted by my company, we discovered that customers become uncomfortable when brands use data they didn’t directly provide. To strike the balance, companies have a responsibility to transparently leverage freely given customer information, without crossing over into data obtained elsewhere.
MARTECH
Customer Data Platforms: Winning And Failing At The Same Time
Quick Take: If analysts fail to properly classify CDPs for the industry, then their clients – the end-user organizations – will suffer from making poorly informed choices. It’s a slippery slope from there as enterprise companies are able to then delay improvements that would lead to better customer experience, revenue and retention.
AI
How to Make Artificial Intelligence More Democratic
Quick Take: The less extensive the data one needs to use, the less incentive exists to surveil people to build better algorithms. For example, soft distillation techniques have already impacted medical AI research, which trains its models using sensitive health information.
Marketers can’t predict what you’ll buy—even if they use A.I.
Quick Take: Even with extensive consumer data for targeting, the ability to predict who is likely to buy a product in an absolute sense remains low. In a recent Facebook campaign, for instance, where millions of users were shown ads for a beauty product that were targeted to their personalities (based on their history of Facebook likes), on average only about 1.5 in 10,000 people that viewed the ads bought the product.
FACIAL RECOGNITION
New tech lets stores be paid by facial recognition
Quick Take: “We offer full 360-degree personalization that enables the store to access data it already has about who you are and the things you like,” Fisher said. People have come to expect this sort of personalization when they shop online, and we want to bring it to in-person shopping as well.”
The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It
Quick Take: Mr. Ton-That demonstrated the app on himself. He took a selfie and uploaded it. The app pulled up 23 photos of him. In one, he is shirtless and lighting a cigarette while covered in what looks like blood. Mr. Ton-That then took my photo with the app. The “software bug” had been fixed, and now my photo returned numerous results, dating back a decade, including photos of myself that I had never seen before. When I used my hand to cover my nose and the bottom of my face, the app still returned seven correct matches for me.
See you next week.
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