These days, many organizations define themselves in terms of their impact on the environment. Naysayers may dismiss companies like Starbucks, UPS and others as engaging in PR stunts. Still, the fact remains: there's potential competitive advantage to be gained by being carbon neutral – or at least by ostensibly caring about environmental issues.
Increasingly, the same can be said for privacy, an issue growing in importance. (I've touched on this topic before.) It's not hard to envision a future in which businesses attempt to differentiate themselves based upon how they manage customer data.
Of course, anything that must be managed can easily be mismanaged, a lesson that OfficeMax learned the hard way:
Yes, OfficeMax customer Mike Seay received the unfortunate flyer above. The glaring question is, How could something so inappropriate have happened?
The very short answer is that OfficeMax routinely purchases data from undisclosed third-party data brokers. In this case, some of that data contained references to Seay's tragedy. No one person or system at OfficeMax discovered the unnecessary and cruel mailing address gaffe.
Now, to be fair, OfficeMax is hardly the only company that purchases supplemental product and customer metadata and data. Netflix does as well. Still, this is exactly that type of thing that justifiably scares customers already spooked by recent high-profile data breaches. And this fear presents a massive opportunity for differentiation, à la green tech. As David Hoffman writes on HBR:
Today, privacy is an active area of marketing for the technology industry. Companies compete on the basis of how long they retain personal data, whether they share data with third parties, the extent to which they encrypt data at rest and in transit, and whether they provide products and services where personal data is automatically deleted or expires.
There's an important lesson here: When using data brokers, tread lightly. Recognize that a snafu or too may very well go viral, causing customers to question whether they want to defect.
Simon says
Maybe in the future I'll pick up a jar of salsa and I won't just see nutritional information related to salt, carbs and calories. Perhaps there will be a label related to what Tenayo does with customer information, and as important, what it doesn't do.
Companies need not hide their privacy terms in long, drawn-out terms of service written in legalese that no one actually reads. Rather, consider putting data privacy front and center, as in on the packaging. As Esther Peterson once said, "you have a right to be informed."
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