Chewing on Customers, Cookies and Content

In episode 70 of The Mindful Marketer, we offer strategies to help you navigate the daunting digital desert and privacy pressures – and help you engage and keep great customers.

Lisa & Jascha. Photo courtesy of Marisa Cali.
Lisa & Jascha. Photo courtesy of Marisa Cali.

Happy 70th Episode to us!

The rapid decline of third-party cookies has made many growth playbooks and audience engagement strategies obsolete.

And eroding stakeholder trust isn’t much help.

2021 Oxford University study asked 92,000 people whether they trust the news media in their country. The highest rated country was Finland. The U.S. came in dead last, at 29%.

In episode 70 of The Mindful Marketer, we offer strategies to help you navigate the daunting digital desert and privacy pressures.

Why it matters? Without a clear understanding of new privacy rules, and the rapidly changing customer expectations, you could lose brand repute and face daunting legal fines.

I was thrilled to welcome Jascha to the show. For over 25 years, he has built agile teams that cultivate trust and drive healthy growth.

Here’s the full episode (41 minutes).

Lisa & Jascha. Photo courtesy of Marisa Cali.

Some show takeaways: 

1. Take responsibility for your customers’ experience—before they leave. Start by clarifying the value exchange between your company and your customers. Without that understanding, you cannot earn the right to gather customer or audience data.

Unsure what value they expect, or need? Ask brand new, long-time, and lost customers what they seek out in a fair value exchange. That will ensure that your first party data strategy endures—and considers your future customers, too.

Here’s the full episode (41 minutes).

2. Create a data council. Include cross-functional team members. Ask them to build a solid customer data platform strategy before selecting a customer data platform (CDP). Cover key data issues, such as compliance, security, privacy, consent, value exchange, information dissemination, and data storage. Include your cybersecurity superstars. Make a plan that addresses a data security breach.

[Here is a free, helpful white paper from Lytics].

3. Build stronger alliances with your legal, data science, and content teams to mitigate privacy fine risks. Gartner predicts that by December 2023, 75% of the world’s population will be under privacy regulations. Without strong stakeholders, you simply cannot stay current on these regulatory trends. Ignorance is a weak defense. It can lead to hefty fines. In late 2022, Google paid a record $391.5 million settlement.

[Click here for the ZDNet story] 

4. Avoid “irrational AI exuberance.” Many of us are rushing to use generative AI without establishing ethical and contextual guardrails. Many customer management platforms rely heavily on AI. Jascha and I addressed the major reputational and ethical risks associated with this approach.

Instead, ask your leaders “Where shall we begin? Should we a) build use cases and run multiple simulations—without any guidelines, or b) first explore and define the proper use, ethics, context, and structure for using the tools?” 

Jascha and I recommend starting with Option B. We cannot assume that teams can read our minds. As you grow, you need to formalize how to align your company values with simulations and innovation practices.

5. Leverage your data science team to continuously address bias. 

At Lytics, Jascha and his team practice “intentional de-biasing.” They begin by hiring diverse teams with different backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives. Jascha believes “this (de-biasing) practice needs to happen in scrum meetings, board discussions, and leadership meetings. It’s critical to remove biases as soon as we find them.”

Accenture, WEF, Intel, IEEE, Google, IBM, and Microsoft have launched toolkits, advocacy groups, and standards to promote equitable AI. I don’t have enough room to list them all! Time will tell which organizations or stakeholders become de facto oversight entities.

Today, we’re juggling multiple standards. I recommend following Timnit Gebru. Here’s her recent Wall Street Journal interview with Emily Bobrow.

The cookies are crumbling. Traditional value exchange approaches and standards are getting stale.How will you rewrite your digital growth strategy recipe? Send me your thoughts.

Before you go – got an idea for a future show or guest? Drop me a note: lisa@lisanirell.com with “Future Show Idea” in the Subject line.

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