People and Privacy —crucial “P’s” of your marketing mix?

My wrist buzz each time Edward Snowden posts on twitter. I have set that up since keeping up with privacy and security is cruzial to any company, organisations, entrepreneur or startup. Snowden acts therefore as a personal reminder to think about security — and he posts almost every day.

I own Onlime.dk — a danish cloudstorage service. We are in business to do three things: keep peoples stuff and information safe, provide personal support for end-user, and lastly to provide a superior cloud service e.g. in terms of speed. We experience that guarding peoples data with care and respect is not only comforting for our security concerns, but it is also very effective as means of marketing.

When i finished my bachelors degree in International Communication & Multimedia i was very much into how Brian Solis talks about Public Relations 2.0 and how being “authentic” and honest is one of the most important factors in how one market oneself. And the added benefit: you openly communicate that you don’t think your users or customers are stupid and careless about their privacy. Companies and organizations should as such be an example for its users and competitors, and they should educate users — not the other way around.

Telling people openly about what data you collect and what you do with it is being honest.

Comming from Denmark ethics on user privacy is a growing concern for many organizations and companies. A new danish think-tank named DATAETHICS advocate that user privacy should be incorporated into virtually any business- and design-decision.

According to them the three most important things to ensure are:

- do we need to collect this data?
- how can we design functions that do not require sensitive information?
- how do we communicate with the user about the information we collect — can it be even more direct and open?

As such Privacy and People can be added as the new “P’s” in the marketing mix. It changes what we value and forces us to focus more directly on the users’ needs and well being.

Instead of relying on mass-collecting data about users used in marketing, we should focus on their well-being. The places and people we like we visit again. And again.

Let me end of with a crazy example: What if the goal or metric of customer-service would be how many deep conversations can be achieved rather than number of calls pr. hour?

Coupled with aggressive attention to users’ privacy, my guess is that you’ll see word-of-mouth, social media and customer retention go crazy…